Thanks for the tips xs0u1x! I'll give auslogics a try. I think you may have convinced me to uninstall Spybot. It has an .exe called TeaTimer that eats up a lot of my systems resources. GREAT idea about the guest account too. So simple yet I had never thought about that. I do get popups every once in a while but I didn't listen to some of your common sense tips
What are your thoughts on Macs? I've been debating recently about switching but a little hesitant for a few reasons (not familiar with the operating system/learning a whole new system again and the cost). iMacs are crazy expensive but a coworker of mine suggested I look into getting a mac mini which is cheaper but still a little pricey since you still have to supple the keyboard, mouse and monitor (which I have). Plus, my PC is only about a year and a half old, custom built by a friend of mine. It runs fairly well, I'm happy with it but HATE when I still get Java exploit viruses and I've already uninstalled and no longer use Java.
No problem glad I could help.
my thoughts on macs? Over priced and misleading, nicely designed though. If you have the spare cash, just don't care anymore and don't want to learn anything, go for a mac. forewarning though, as the saying goes you can't fix stupid. A person who is dumb on a windows machine is still going to be dumb on a mac(security/functionality wise, I know that sounds harsh but its the truth lol)
misleading in the sense whenever you hear "mac" and "no viruses for mac" I think.....well...that's because less than 5%(i believe thats the latest figure) of the pc market of the entire world, consists of mac's. If you look at smartphones, a large amount of people have iphones and there are exploits out the ying yang for it in the wild.
Then again, i'm a budget minded person and cost is just too much to justify for what you actually get. really, its more of a status symbol IMO. Thats not trashing all apple products, just their desktops/pc's. My son is autistic and has an IPAD for part of his therapy. I do alot of part swapping and upgrading on my own computer too, because I play alot of games on it, and you just can't do that on macs without it costing an arm and a leg(if you want to upgrade anything beyond memory or the hard drive)
as far as if you do want to make the switch to something else, I put my 65 year old mother-in-law on linux mint(every distribution of linux is free, including linux mint) and she loved it. She was ready to throw out a couple g's for a mac and I had her try it out for a couple days on her old pc and she changed her mind lol.
