Simple computer help needed

[BobR]

No, the computer is not simple but I have never tried to do this before. I have a co-worker that is less computer literate than I am and she recently bought a Win 8 laptop for school. As far as she knows there is no AV on it, or anything else for that matter.

What I want to do is put the Win 7 shell onto her desktop as she isn't real fond of the Win 8 startup. I also need to drop a good (free?) AV into it for her. I was also going to load spybot, adaware, CCleaner and possibly IObit stuff into it for her to run on a regular basis.

Most of it I can get done while I am cooking dinner for us, but the AV and Win 8 to Win 7 look is what I am a little concerned about as I haven't used a free AV for a while and have never even looked at a Win 8 box.

So what does the collective say, it has to be something she can remember to do and also simple. She is from the iPad generation and doesn't really know much about laptops.

bob

[Hawkmoon]

Download and install "Classic Shell."

For an anti-virus, I use and recommend Avast! It's free, it's pretty darned good, and it automatically updates the virus database daily.

[Brad Johnson]

Classic Shell for the win, although setting it to boot straight to Desktop works decently well.

Brad

[Calumus]

Download and install "Classic Shell."

Yup. Skip Spybot and Adaware, they're about 6 years or so past their prime. Throw Malwarebytes Free on it instead. Windows 8 comes with Microsoft Security Essentials pre-installed and labeled as Windows Defender. Not very good anymore. If free is needed, I'd recommend Bitdefender free. You just have to register an email with them, and click a conformation link. Much lighter on system resources then AVG or Avast, and last I checked, had better detection rates.