Post-installation tasks

- Once you've installed Windows onto a system, that's where the real work begins. So in this section, which I call "Post-Installation Tasks," these are all the little jobs we've got to do after Windows is installed. The first place we want to head over to is Device Manager. When you do an initial install, Windows has tons and tons, and tons of device drivers in there. But if you take a look, you'll see that we show a couple of errors here. And they're invariably really scary errors. Like, base system device. Or, south bridge controller, or core system. What you're looking at here, is there's stuff on the motherboard, itself, that Windows simply doesn't recognize. And in that case, what we've got to do, is we've got to find the optical media that comes with this motherboard. And we have to go through the process on installing it. This can take awhile. And a lot of times, especially if you're buying a motherboard that a couple of years old. It's still a great motherboard, but the drivers, themselves, are probably a little bit obsolete even on here. So then what we end up doing, is we have to go online. All I did was a quick search of the model of this particular motherboard. And I found the manufacturer's website. They all have these. So this one wants me to choose an operating system. So I've got Windows 1064 Byte. And you can see that there are a lot of drivers that are in here. And I promise you, these are much newer than the ones on the motherboard driver disc. So the trick here is grabbing the thumb drive. Usually I have to go to another system, 'cause a lot of times even the network card isn't working on a new Windows install. Go to another system, grab a thumb drive, download all the drivers, then plug that into your new system. And start installing all this stuff. There's a million ways to do it. A lot of them will have a default. One screen will come up. And it'll say, "Here's all the different things." And it's going to be the core stuff. There going to be one for like SADA. There's going to be one for RAY if that's available. There's usually one for audio. And they break them down usually into three, four, up to 10 different sub-sections. You just install them all. Oh, and by the way, don't install the extra web browser and other garbage that they tend to put in these types of installs. The bottom line is, you're going to have to take a good amount of time installing all of the different motherboard drivers. And that's a normal case of events. The other big issue is with the video cards, themselves. Video cards have amazing capabilities. And their device drivers tend to update quite a bit. A lot of times, Windows will not recognize your device driver, or it will put in a dated device driver. In that case once again, you're reduced to grabbing optical media and doing an update. But if you're me, I always go to the manufacturer, and get the latest drivers for my video card to make sure that they're in good order. All right, so I'm going to go ahead and start doing all this updating. Give me a minute. And when I get back, we should have a very pretty device manager. All right, so it's taken me a few tries. But I've been installing device drivers for awhile. And all of a sudden, well, thing are already looking prettier. Notice that the resolution of the screen seems nicer. Wow! How pretty is that? You have to take your time with these device drivers. It just takes awhile as you go through these, or you're going online to download 'em. Whatever you got to do. Just make sure you take your time, and you get 'em. The ultimate test is pretty simple. Open up device manager, and see how it looks. Now, that is a pretty device manager. In fact, it's a little small. (chuckling) Good thing I've got a high-resolution monitor here. But what's important is even at this resolution, I can quickly see. I don't have any more exclamation points. All of the hardware is in the system. Windows recognizes it, and it has good device drivers. Just because the hardware is working right, there's some other stuff we need to be doing on. In particular, we need to be preparing for problems for the future. So the first thing I want to do, is make sure that my Windows, itself, is being updated. I think I can make these icons a little bit bigger. So, let's fire up Windows Update. Well, it's a brand-new install, so there's no updates available yet. However, this is where I want to go ahead and make sure that I've got my active hours. When are the times I don't want this thing to update? So, between 8 a.m. and 5 p.m. by default, it's never going to try to restart the device, or anything like that. You can also set up some advanced options here. For example, you get updates on other Microsoft products. For example, if you have Office on here. You can automatically download the updates, even over metered data connections. So, you might want to be careful with that one. Show notification. I like to have that one show up, because I want to see if it's going to reboot. And then, I can actually pause updates. This brings up a really, really important issue. With Windows, in particular Windows 10, you don't have the option to not accept updates, they just happen. There is no ability for you to absolutely shut down updates. The only way you can do that is if you use a very specific version of Windows, called Windows Enterprise. And you're not going to go to the store and buy one of those. Those are only for large enterprise customers. So the bottom line is you will get updates. You can pause them for a while, but you're never ever going to stop them. All right, so it looks like I've got all my update options set up pretty good. I'm happy with that. The next thing I want to start talking about, is the concept of what I call a recovery disk. So, let me show you how to do that. (keystrokes clicking) A recovery drive is nothing more than your own personal copy of a Windows installation media. You can also back up the system files to the recovery drive. This particular option isn't that critical. We will cover this in other episodes when we're talking about repairing Windows. But for now, I'm just going to turn it off. And it's going to take a minute. But what it's going to do, it's going to look for a flash drive. And by the way, that flash drive has to be 16 gigabytes to do this. And, it's going to go ahead and basically make Windows Installation Media. Now you might say to yourself, "Mike, I've got my original installation media. "Why would I want another?" Well, because this is, we protect this. This goes in a closet, and we don't touch it, we leave it alone. So we have our own copy, and we'll keep that around. So, that's the first thing you'll want to do. The next thing we want to do is create a restore point. Now, a restore point is like a snapshot of my system as it currently is. So what I've got right now is Windows system that is properly installed. I've got all my device drivers in there. It's updating, which is great. But there's no applications, there's nothing in here. The restore point, we're going to create basically says, I want a copy of how it is right now. So if I have a problem in the future, then I could come back to this point. This is particularly important during your post-installation task. Because, we're notorious for installing bad applications that do naughty things and lock up computers. And I want to be able to get back to where I was before. So, let's go ahead and make a restore point. (keyboard clicking) So, to make a restore point, all we need to do, is we're going to turn on what we call "System Protection." So this will allow us to make restore points. Now, we can set how much drive space. The problem is restore points can be a little bit larger. So, we're just going to leave that alone for right now, and hit Okay. And now I can create a restore point. Now, we got to give it some descriptive name. (keyboard clicking) Just installed (keyboard clicking) Windows 10. Although I would normally include a date as well; however, all of the restore points are time-stamped. So not really critical. So it's now going to make this restore point. Now, I'm going to hopefully never have to use it as the best example. But, if I ever run to a situation, particularly when I'm doing my initial application installs, and my system is locking up, or acting weird, I can just go back to that restore point, and try again, figure out what's wrong with my applications. Okay, now the next thing we have to do is almost a non-issue. I just want to bring it up, because Windows does this automatically. And that's anti-malware and firewall. (silence) (silence) Setting up your anti-malware and your firewall is handled all under your Windows security settings. So, let's go ahead and open up Windows security. And right now, you can see that everything's got a green checkbox. Because basically, everything's pre-installed. If you get Windows 10 today, it comes with anti-malware, not only installed, but working properly. It has a firewall set up so that if some problem tries to start talking outside that you don't want it to, you can catch it. It does a really good job by default. The only time this becomes interesting at all, is if something goes wrong, and you need to fix it. Like for example, there is no such thing as a perfect anti-malware tool. And sometimes you might have a problem where you need to go into and turn off your anti-malware. We have huge episodes that cover all this. But this is something we do right at the beginning. And these days, it's really just a check and go, "Yep, everything looks good." Okay one more thing, and we're done with our post-installation task. And that's something called "File History." (keyboard clicking) File History is a tool that allows you to keep backup copies of anything you're changing. I mean on a file-by-file basis. So right now File History is turned off. It is turned off by default. So, I want to get this turned on. And, it's going to take awhile. I'm not going to sit here and stare at this. So that's a lot of post-installation tasks. For a lot of us technicians, it takes us a longer to do the post-installation task, than the actual installation of Windows, itself. (silence)