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A few thoughts:

1) After running a backup or two, what does Samsung Magican say your SSD temperatures are on your computer drive and your backup drive? If you’re running several backups in a row it could be throttling the later ones. I’ve had this with SATA Samsung SSDs before, at least.

2) It will probably say that it doesn’t support your drive, but Samsung Magician does offer a Diagnostic Scan function.

3) Macrium can be configured to run a verification on your backup after it has created it. Does this show any errors? If it doesn’t, then that sounds like it could be EaseUS’ problem. I’ve not used EaseUS before, though, so I can’t really advise on it.

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krism

A McAfee scan would be good, I second that, but I would also suggest a full scan of your system with Malwarebytes Free. Go to Scanner -> Advanced scanners -> Custom Scan, and select everything, including ‘Scan for rootkits’, on the left and all of your drives on the right.

There’s probably no problem, but there’s no harm in doing it, and Malwarebytes is a better on-demand scanner than Mcafee.

Note: Malwarebytes is not a replacement for a regular antivirus program.

This is a bit of a sledgehammer approach, since it also disables search history, but you can disable Bing searches by Enabling the following Group Policy, which doesn’t say that it disables Bing searches, but it does for some reason:

User Configuration > Administrative Templates > Windows Components > File Explorer > Turn off display of recent search entries in the File Explorer search box

You used to be able to just disable Bing without any side effects with a registry entry, but Microsoft, in its infinite wisdom, removed that option with 2004.

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doriel

I’m not sure about mine, but I will give you the (reported) last words of the great Oscar Wilde:

“This wallpaper is dreadful. One of us will have to go.”

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SueW, OscarCP, Myst, wavy

This seems like a perfect opportunity to share this, as it needs to be spread across the internet as far as possible:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PCcgBLizbzc

Yes, that is Mark Hamill, and no, I don’t know what’s going on either. I don’t suppose that I would even if I spoke German.

But will my AOL trial CDs still work? That’s the pressing question.

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Cybertooth

Do you have an external HDD? If there’s going to be a delay in getting the new drive, and given that you’re installing Macrium Reflect anyway, you could always just image it to the external HDD and you can have that in an emergency, since it’s possible to copy from that to a new drive (albeit harder). I would recommend doing this ASAP if there’s going to be a delay in swapping out the drive.

EDIT: Sorry for repeating what you said Alex5723, I had the page open for a while before I posted and didn’t see your post before I posted mine.

Replacing the HDD with a SSD should make a world of difference to you.

I recommend that you use Macrium Reflect. It has a free edition that does everything you want and is easy to use.

To transfer to a new drive, you want to clone the HDD on to the SSD. The easiest way to do this is by putting the SSD in a USB caddy and then installing it in the computer after it has been cloned to.

Here’s an article from Macrium about the differences between imaging and cloning, for further information and as a citation:
https://blog.macrium.com/techie-tuesday-image-or-clone-e6be74abb089

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7ProSP1

Yes, that is correct, unfortunately. That is what I missed and what b pointed out. Sadly Microsoft has decided that we shall no long have that privacy option! The other settings both work fine on Windows 10, however.

Susan just whitelisted me, so here’s the link:

https://www.windowscentral.com/how-quickly-check-net-framework-version-windows-10

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samak, geekdom

The Set what information is shared in Search setting isn’t supported in Windows 10, but it’s irrelevent to disabling Cortana, I just mentioned it as an aside since it’s search-related.

The setting that does disable Cortana (Allow Cortana) very much works on Windows 10, as does the Allow search and Cortana to use location. setting.

I hope that you have been able to successfully disable Cortana now.

Having Windows 10 Pro only makes it easier to disable Cortana. Just use the Group Policy Editor as I mentioned in the first paragraph of my post here. It’s only one of my other suggestions that doesn’t apply to Windows 10; disabling Cortana will work on your system and only requires the first policy change that I mentioned to do.

If you’re having trouble finding the Group Policy Editor, just type gpedit in the search box, and right click and Run as administator to open it.

On Windows 10, and this might work for earlier versions too, you can check what .NET Framework version you have by navigating in the Registtry Editor to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\NET Framework Setup\NDP. From there, select the latest version (probably v4), select the Client key, and look for the Version value.

The are other ways to find your version, but this is probably the quickest way. There’s an excellent article on Windows Central explaining the various ways, but I’m blocked from posting it again.

Personally, I hold the fan with a grounded hand and use compressed air on it like that. I was advised to do it like this many years ago and there’ no risk of rotation this way. You’re right that you can break a fan if it rotates the wrong way, though, an important warning.

As for your question: yes, dust is conductive. Dust, not very pleasantly, is mostly made of dead human skin, and skin is conductive (as you probably found out playing with balloons as a child).

Might you get away with it? Sure. But a quick Google comes up with sites such as How-To Geek recommending strongly against it, as well as anecdotes from users on Reddit and Superuser claiming that they had computer components killed while vacuuming them.

I don’t know if it’s evidence per se, but the logic behind it makes sense: you shouldn’t go near computer components with anything that can carry a static charge, and that includes vacuums, which can build one up from the movement of dust. Compressed air, on the other hand, is used with a distance between itself and the components, and comes out at such a rate that it cleans everything right up. Similarly, this is why you should always ground yourself when messing around inside your computer.

Sorry to contradict you, it just doesn’t seem worth the risk to vacuum given the risks and the cost of the alternatives.