Getting hammered with pop up adds here

Quite frankly, this is kind of thing that every single one of us should always be ready to deal with

1....The Pubic, that's us, SHOULD be DEMANDING every time we buy a new machine, to get installation disks for the OS and software, or at the very least "restore" disks. What is NOT acceptable is the current state of a "restore partition" on the hard drive..........because WHEN the hard drive dies, "you are screwed."

When you DO buy a computer, get ahold of customer support or online and ORDER a set of recovery / software disks for your machine.

Learn to use "imaging" programs and BACKUP your data, your photos, your documents. Nowadays, with USB devices, this is easier than ever. So called "cloud" type stuff online is also available, although I do not like this approach........jus' my opinion

This gets deeper, and I have not figured this out for a used Dell I picked up, but Google around and learn to save/ copy the restore partition so that if the hard drive dies, and you don't have restore disks, you STILL have an avenue of reinstalling to a new hard drive

2....Refer to rule one, above. Sometimes, a system gets so "effed up" that quite frankly, unless you are an IT expert, the simplest way to "fix" things is to simply reinstall/ restore. Yes, this is a PITA. But it's still cheaper to learn to do this than to pay XXXXXX dollars per hour to some joker who may or may not know what he's doing

3.....I've said this before.....Consider learning to use Linux. Here, I simply don't worry much about viruses. There ARE things I can't do in Linux. One is the EFI programming for my Holley EFI. Occasionally, there's other stuff (one of my photo scanners) that I must resort to Winhozed in order to use.

4.....Learn, Google, and keep up on a few good software tools, mentioned in this thread, and keep your virus software updated.

5....Learn to NOT "obey" pop ups and other nonsense that tell you that you must update this or that without DOUBLE checking first. There are a lot of so called update alerts that are IN FACT viruses themselves.

On the last two machines I bought new, the very first thing I did was to buy a brand new spare hard drive for the machine, set it up and get it up and running so I know it works. That is, an exact copy of the oriignal in the machine.

THEN that hard drive pretty much gets stored, but I periodically dump copies of my files, photos, documents into that hard drive as a storage drive. If the main drive ever fails, I may lose "a little" but not much.