What is the best way to set up my new computer?

Erick is having issues with his Dell laptop batteries swelling and causing a bulge in his laptop. So Dell replaced not only the battery, but the entire laptop. Could it happen again? Leo says that all manufacturers have had issues with swelling batteries, but it's unlikely that it will happen again. If it does, it's in their interest to replace it because after swelling of a battery comes catching fire and explosions.

How should he best set up this new laptop? Leo says the first thing he should do is uninstall any trial ware. If he doesn't use it, he should get rid of it. Especially any antivirus software. But he needs to be careful, because there may be some proprietary stuff by Dell that's required. Then, he should make an image of the hard drive so that if something happens, he can recover right away. He can use a USB key for this.

Imaging options include:

• Deep Freeze by Faronics.
• Clonezilla
• EaseUS
• Drive Snapshot
• Macrium
• Carbonite Image Backup
• DriveImageXML

Leo's been using DriveImageXML lately because Steve Gibson recommends it. It's not free, but allows you to get back to where you were when calamity struck.

Image By Evan-Amos (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0 or GFDL], via Wikimedia Commons