Check Laptop after Repair

[werdnarolyat]

Hi All,

We recently received our laptop back from the manufacturer after they did a repair under warranty.

I’m planning on running Avast and Malwarebytes to check that nothing untoward has been installed on the laptop; I’m possibly being paranoid but I don’t think it’s outside the realms of possibility.

Would you run the above software and also an additional scan from another on demand scanner? Or is there something more robust I should do? e.g. a clean install.

Thanks.

[veeg]

Hello

Sure you can run that software… Let’s get more opinions on what other software to run..

@Malnutrition jmarket @Rustys

[Rustys]

What is wrong with just using the built in Windows Defender.
Avast has become a memory and resource hog.

Running more that one AV will cause conflicts with each other and false positives.

Doing a clean install I have done that to systems when I get them back and even fresh out of the box.
Then you have to go through and uninstall all that bloatware that is there.

[Bruce]

+1 on the reinstall.
best way to guarantee ONLY the OS is there from the get-go.

[werdnarolyat]

Many thanks for the advice. I’ll probably go with a clean install.

The laptop has two drives - an SSD as the system drive and a larger HDD.

If the clean install is done on the system drive would I also have to format the HDD?

[Bruce]

during the re-install, double check when it prompts you that you are really going to do it to the SSD.
and as part of that process, on the screen that shows all the drives and partitions, I’d remove all the partitions on the SSD as part of the clean install.

if the HDD has no data or you don’t care about the data, then you could do the same if you wanted to, but it’s not necessary as part of the clean install of the OS to the SSD.

[werdnarolyat]

Thanks Bruce.

I’m happy to have this marked as solved.

[Rustys]

Thank you for letting us know

Happy computing.