It sounds like a rather mundane topic, now, doesn’t it? We’ve all done it before, but we all do it differently, I’ve found. Some people like to do the Windows setup and dive straight in and use the new toy, while others spend time tweaking the setup, getting it just so before settling in to do work. Others still ditch whatever the system came with and start fresh, with a clean install of Windows or Linux, depending on which they prefer.

Recently, Lenovo sent me an IdeaPad U310 Touch Ultrabook as part of their Lenovo Insiders program, so I thought I’d go into detail about how I typically set up my computers by using it as an example.

If you haven’t seen it, you can see me unbox it and talk about it in brief here on YouTube and I’ll be doing up a review and posting it here in the next couple of weeks once I’ve spent some more time with it.

Step 1: Unboxing

This task is always fun, and naturally has to be done before you can do anything with the computer. I like to make sure that it does have everything, check the documentation just in case there’s any weird oddities in setup (e.g. with the Toshiba notebooks from about last year and earlier that I set up at work, you definitely had to have them plugged in because they proceeded to image themselves with a basic install of Windows and then install each driver and application for you in Sysprep mode before sealing itself ready for your use) and keep anything relevant and\or useful. Chuck in the battery, plug it into the mains, and fire it up.

Step 2: Basic Setup

Nothing too special here, Windows asks where you are, what language you speak, what keyboard layout you have, what your name is, what its name is, and then various settings relating to updates, what information is shared with Microsoft and so on. I usually go through the manual steps and keep everything but the Windows Update options the same, because I like my updates to be set to notify, don’t download.

Extra Windows 8 Step

One thing to note – unlike Windows 7, Windows 8 doesn’t prompt you to choose a time zone during this stage. So once the basic setup is finished, you’ll need to go to the Desktop, right click the clock, click Adjust Date/Time, and in the window that comes up click Change Time Zone then select your time zone from the list on the screen. Click OK and make sure that the time and date in the main Date and Time window matches the actual date and time. If it doesn’t, you have two choices: you can either click Change date and time… and set it manually, or go to the Internet Time tab, click Change Settings… and then click Update now twice – the first time will error out, but the second time will work fine.

If you’re in Australia, especially if you’re on an Internode ADSL connection, change the time server to ntp.internode.on.net – this way the time will be a touch more accurate as the default Windows time servers tend to be overseas.

This was something I didn’t notice up until I went to open Outlook to check my emails and wondered why emails I had just received had a timestamp of 1am.

Step 3: Install the 8.1 Update

If you’ve gotten a computer that has Windows 8.1, you obviously don’t need to do this step. In this case, this IdeaPad only had Windows 8, so naturally the update was required.

One good thing about the 8.1 update is that once installed, you generally won’t need to touch Windows Update until the next Patch Tuesday. Unfortunately for me, I received and set up the IdeaPad the day before August’s Patch Tuesday, so I didn’t have to wait very long before more updates were available.

Installing the 8.1 update is easy – first you need to have two updates from Microsoft installed, specifically updates KB2871389 and KB2917499 which you can download by clicking on those links. Once you have installed them and restarted, open the Windows Store from the Start Screen, and there’ll be a big blue prompt to install the update. Click it and away you go!

Make sure that your device is plugged into the mains if it’s a laptop, tablet or other battery powered device, as this update can take a couple of hours or more – the IdeaPad I have is the i7 model and it took almost three hours to download and install the update and restarted several times. This is definitely something you can set the computer up to do while you go and do something else.

Once it’s done, you’ll have to briefly reintroduce yourself to Windows. If you don’t want to use a Microsoft account, make sure that you’re not connected to the internet during this part or else the reintroduction process will force it on you. Easiest way to do this: if you’ve connected by wifi, turn it off until you’re at the Start Screen; if you’re connected via Ethernet, unplug the cable from the computer.

Step 4: Uninstall Useless Preinstalled Software

It’s a fact of life that, unless you are lucky enough to be able to get your hands on a Microsoft Signature computer, your computer will have bloatware on it of some kind. Most of it is useless junk that you’ll never use, trials for software that you don’t need or already have and so on. So ideally, you want to get rid of it.

Fortunately, this Lenovo didn’t come with much bloatware that I considered useless. The Desktop apps that it came with that weren’t drivers were:

• Absolute Data Protect (seems to be similar to Lojack, starts from $19\year)
• Dolby Home Theatre v4 (adjusts the audio to make it sound better\worse, handy for small laptop speakers)
• Lenovo Energy Management (power plans and drivers specifically for the laptop)
• Intel AppUp Centre (Intel’s app store)
• Lenovo\Cyberlink MediaShow (photo\video editing, sharing etc.)
• Lenovo\Cyberlink OneKey Recovery (for system backup and recovery)
• Lenovo Photos (software for ordering photographic products, e.g. prints, mugs, photo books etc.)
• Lenovo Smart Update (updates Facebook, Twitter and email messages when the computer is asleep)
• Lenovo\Cyberlink Youcam (for taking selfies with the included webcam)
• McAfee Internet Security 11.6 Trial (awful)
• Office Trial (can either be used a 30 day trial of Office 365 Premium or used to activate any Office 2013 or 365 license)
• Lenovo Motion Control (control certain programs with hand gestures)
• Nitro Pro 8 (trial, creates\views\edits PDFs)
• Lenovo Cloud Storage by SugarSync (a la OneDrive, Dropbox, Google Drive)
• Lenovo User Guide (the user guide for the computer)

It also came with a few Metro apps:

• McAfee Security Advisor (talks to the desktop McAfee apps)
• AccuWeather (nice, slick weather app, but put my location in a suburb north west of where I actually live)
• rara.com (music streaming a la Spotify)
• Evernote (note taking software a la OneNote)
• Skype (video calls and IM)
• Lenovo Support (links to product support and registration for the laptop)
  Lenovo Companion (links to getting started guides, system checks for updates, Lenovo news and so on)
• Encyclopaedia Britannica (the encyclopaedia, requires subscription at $9.99\year)
• Merriam Webster Dictionary (a dictionary, 30 day free trial)
• Filmon Television (a selection of various online TV streaming channels)
• Zinio (the magazine reader)
• eBay (the online auction site)
• Lenovo Cloud Storage by SugarSync (same as above)

To be honest, a lot of the Metro ones aren’t that useful to me. Fortunately, they’re easy enough to uninstall under 8.1 – select all the offending Metro apps from the Start screen, click Uninstall down the bottom, and they’re gone.

As for the desktop ones, though, they’re a bit more of a pain to get rid of. I use a program called PC Decrapifier to get rid of them. It’s a free app, available from here,  that presents you with a list of all the installed desktop apps on your computer that you can select and have it uninstall for you automatically. Pretty simple to do, but make sure that if any apps want a restart after they uninstall that you don’t let them do it to make sure the process runs uninterrupted. If any do need a restart, just do one after the entire process is complete.

If you’re not sure what to remove, a general rule of thumb is never to remove anything with the word Intel, nVidia or AMD in it (EDIT: as well as Realtek, Conexant and Alcor), as well as anything with the name of your computer manufacturer unless you’ve determined it’s not a system utility that’s required (back to the Toshiba example, Toshiba Bulletin Board and Toshiba ReelTime are two examples of utilities that Toshiba provide that I have yet to discover an actual use for and can be safely removed).

Also something to be aware of: sometimes the preinstalled antivirus trials won’t remove themselves completely – in my case McAfee left some traces behind that loaded on start-up still and I’ve seen once or twice in the past Norton uninstalls that simply hang and never complete, requiring their tasks to be killed and a restart. If this happens, you’ll need to download the appropriate removal tool from their website and run it. It’s a good idea to do so anyway, especially if you’re using another product from a different provider (e.g. removing McAfee to install Kaspersky). You can find the McAfee, Norton\Symantec and Trend Micro removal utilities here – these tend to be the three that are included most with new computers.

Step 5: Install Useful Software

Now that everything useless has come off, I then like to put everything useful on. For this, we turn to my good friend, Ninite.

If you’ve never heard of Ninite before, it basically makes the process of installing a huge number of free apps orders of magnitude easier. You go to their website, check the ones you want from their extensive list (a hair over 90 apps are available), click on Download, and you’ll get a 248KB executable. Run that executable, elevate it when prompted, and it will download and install\update to the latest versions the selected apps. Best of all, it does it without the junk that apps comes with – no Ask toolbar or any of that nonsense. It’s also free.

I have a package of apps that I like to download and install on all my computers. You can have a look at the package I use here (it may download the executable automatically depending on your browser, just delete it if you don’t want it).

Other software, though, isn’t included. Office, for instance, isn’t included through Ninite. As you may have noticed, I kept the trial that came with the computer. In this case, my university gives all students five licenses for Office 365 ProPlus through their Office 365 subscriptions. In this case, I just fired up the Office trial app, clicked Activate and opted to sign in with my uni credentials. Office ProPlus was installed and activated.

Next, antivirus. Although Windows 8 and 8.1 come with Security Essentials rebranded as Windows Defender, it is baseline. I prefer to use something a bit more robust. Options I like include Norton Internet Security or 360, Webroot SecureAnywhere, Kaspersky Internet Security or one of the ESET offering (the latter of which I’m using on this). If you’re after a decent, free antivirus, you can’t go past Bitdefender Free, which needs only free activation, at which point it will sit in your system tray and do its thing, annoying you only when it finds something.

Then there’s a couple of little utilities that I just have to have. Chief among these is BatteryBar, something that emulates the little battery meter that Lenovo Power Manager had under Windows 7 and older. There’s a Pro version with a lot of features which is quite reasonably priced at $8 per machine for a lifetime license, but for me the Free version is more than sufficient. I also use the Zune desktop client for playing music, mainly because I have a Zune HD that I love and use to this day.

Step 6 – Windows Update

The last thing I do is run a Windows Update and install all available updates for the computer. Usually the 8.1 update will install all of them, but it does skip some of the optional ones (e.g. it usually misses .NET Framework 4.5) and in this case I updated the day before Patch Tuesday, so had more to install. Simple enough to do, search for Windows Update from the Start menu or screen, fire it up and let it do it’s thing.

Step 7 – Get Stuff Done

At this point, the computer for me is largely set up and ready to go. It might need a few tweaks here and there to get it just right, but I can easily take it to uni and use it for work with minimal fuss.

So, what do you like to put on your PC? Do you have any special things that you like to do when you set up a new machine? Let me know in the comments below!