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The mention of Avast prompts me, perhaps a little bit off-topic, to recount my own experience.

I took my wife’s desktop box to the repair store, accepted that her hard drive was dead, and a replacement with an SSD.  They said: “We normally put Avast on any machine”, pause?  No, I said, no way, no Avast.

Well, of course, it came back with Avast, unasked.  My first move was to fire up Revo, try to remove Avast.  What they had put on was something that Revo could not remove.  I phoned the store.  Don’t worry, said the store, we’ll remove it remotely.  And they did.

That counts to me as Avast trying to increase its foothold.

What was this?  What form of software that the computer store could manipulate remotely?

A sad blemish on a computer store in whom, otherwise, I have a good level of confidence.

Dell E5570 Latitude, Intel Core i5 6440@2.60 GHz, 8.00 GB - Win 10 Pro

ibe98765 wrote:

Up until yesterday (12/15, the Ides of December)

Sorry, the Ides was only the 15th day of the month in March, May, July and October; in all other months, it was the 13th.

As ever, life’s a bitch!  Why couldn’t these Romans be consistent?

Dell E5570 Latitude, Intel Core i5 6440@2.60 GHz, 8.00 GB - Win 10 Pro

If you know how OneDrive works, you might want to avoid having it as your only backup.  You really need to have a backup that is distinct from your own drive, and OneDrive is not that.

Dell E5570 Latitude, Intel Core i5 6440@2.60 GHz, 8.00 GB - Win 10 Pro

OscarCP wrote:

Indeed. This can be dealt only through truly working international cooperation. Between the USA, Canada, the UK, the EU and Japan, for a start. And not just for helping people with their Christmas shopping.

So much spam comes from the USA, it is said.  If the USA and other North Atlantic nations did something EFFECTIVE about spam and other internet abuse, then the remainder, from Russia, Baltic states, India, Indonesia, Malaysia might stand as a bit more exposed.

Dell E5570 Latitude, Intel Core i5 6440@2.60 GHz, 8.00 GB - Win 10 Pro

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OscarCP, wavy

Susan Bradley wrote:

This is one of the reasons I like to have multiple browsers and then one is “loosey goosey” another is tweaked more.

I second that, and have four browsers on my machine.  Firefox is my default browser, but I can go easily to one of the others using the Firefox extension OpenWith, which I recommend.  It is a bit of a pain to install as you have run a short Python script (which is right at the edge of my competence), but once done, it’s fine.

Dell E5570 Latitude, Intel Core i5 6440@2.60 GHz, 8.00 GB - Win 10 Pro

lmacri wrote:

If you’re looking for Dell BIOS updates start at https://www.catalog.update.microsoft.com/Search.aspx?q=dell+firmware. You’ll see a warning stating that “Your search resulted in over 1000 matching updates. Only the first 1000 are returned” so you’d have to add additional keywords (e.g., ” 2021″ , “1.15.0”, etc.) to the search term to narrow down the search results.

I would never look at Microsoft for a BIOS update for a Dell machine.  That sounds like a recipe for potential disaster, if you were to take the wrong BIOS, i.e. for the wrong machine.

Go to Dell > Support, input the Dell Service Tag for your machine, and you will find the correct version of the BIOS for your machine.  I would not advocate doing this any other way.  It helps to create an account with Dell, but I don’t think it is mandatory (though you might have done this to safeguard your warranty)

 

Dell E5570 Latitude, Intel Core i5 6440@2.60 GHz, 8.00 GB - Win 10 Pro

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Microfix

Patrad – you are prudent to think of uninstalling the previous version first.

These columns are full of posts from people who try to have two different versions of MS Office installed simultaneously.

Dell E5570 Latitude, Intel Core i5 6440@2.60 GHz, 8.00 GB - Win 10 Pro

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Patrad

What about fluff?  You didn’t say whether you were using a mouse with an actual ball, or a laser mouse.  The ball could pick up fluff, and possibly give some of the errors that you hve described.

I prefer trackballs, and have to make sure that the socket in which the ball moves is clean.

Dell E5570 Latitude, Intel Core i5 6440@2.60 GHz, 8.00 GB - Win 10 Pro

It’s a pain installing all those applications over again, and you don’t say whether you are at all pressed for drive space on your new machine.

However, a suite of freshly installed apps avoids all the build up of files from obsolete installations in the c:\windows\installer and c:\windows\winSxS folders.  You will be amazed at how much drive space those folders consume.  TreeSize (Free) will show you.

Re-installing my Surface Pro 3 from a clean reset saved close on 50 GB of out-of-date files in those locations – but I was quite seriously constrained for drive space.

Dell E5570 Latitude, Intel Core i5 6440@2.60 GHz, 8.00 GB - Win 10 Pro

b – yes, I see that, thanks.

Dell E5570 Latitude, Intel Core i5 6440@2.60 GHz, 8.00 GB - Win 10 Pro

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b

This topic has just been started, by oldguy, at (approx 11:30 GMT)

And yet, I already have an eMail timestamped 11:28 to say that I have subscribed to the topic for replies.

Somehow, I was subscribed to the topic without my intervention – I’m almost certain that I was doing something else at 11:30, and that this is my first visit to the page, now about 18:00.  All times GMT, i.e. forum time plus 5 hours.

Dell E5570 Latitude, Intel Core i5 6440@2.60 GHz, 8.00 GB - Win 10 Pro

We in the UK get calls impersonating Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs, but they give themselves away by saying, in a very mid-Atlantic accent that a warrant for your arrest has been taken out “at the county courthouse”.  We don’t have county courthouses!

The “in your face”, very authoritative tone of the recorded voice could induce terror in people who did not know that their tax affairs were up-to-date.

Dell E5570 Latitude, Intel Core i5 6440@2.60 GHz, 8.00 GB - Win 10 Pro

joep517 wrote:

I’m guessing you can do the same on an iPhone

Yes, you can

Dell E5570 Latitude, Intel Core i5 6440@2.60 GHz, 8.00 GB - Win 10 Pro

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Towson_Steve

Thank you, oldguy, and thank you, Susan

I did find this thread on Microsoft Community, started in Oct-13, still alive currently, full of people posting more or less the same issue, and frustrated that MS shows no sign of wanting to address their concerns: Desktop icons move from main screen to extended screen monitor.

Susan – more than one contributor mentioned Stardock Fences, and I was about to pony up their £ 5.99 (US$ 8.00-ish) when I came across Icon Shepherd, which is free for personal use.

It seems to have been a very simple answer to what should not have been a complex problem.  I’ll post again if anything goes awry.

Dell E5570 Latitude, Intel Core i5 6440@2.60 GHz, 8.00 GB - Win 10 Pro

The advantage of installing Windows without logging in is that you can choose the account name that YOU want, and not the one that MS assigns to you, using the first five characters of your MS account log-in name.

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Cybertooth