I don’t believe they would give you any problem as such, we have seen them placed in other partitions, I guess so there isn’t an issue reverting back to your win7 installation.
Not a problem now they are gone.
Windows Explorer does actually give more information, but you have to look at the top of the window, it should show the path to the folder you are actually in. You can also right click on a file and select Properties, that should also show the folder location.
Like most, I have to work with my device. In autumn 2015 I reverted to Win 7 as Win 10 kept crashing. They say that was because the free offer was still in its Beta stage. I’m staying put.
I see you use OS XP Pro still. I know a couple of people who do this, one of whom has to work with an enormous amount of charts, maps, photos as a self-employed engineer…the oS has to take a heavy work load daily (but he does have the habit of visiting some notoriously dodgy sites for his entertainment. I know this as he insists on showing them to me…porn…yawn).
I never asked him about it, but in the absence of XP updates he must have a very good virus protection. The PC is crucial to his successful livelihood.
I expect you are as happy with Avast free as I have been since 2008.
Having a good Antivirus is just one part of keeping your system safe.
I too have some old software that I regularly use that won’t make the move/transition to win10 and for that reason I was hanging back.
I also take lots of proactive measures, not to mention using DropMyRights on all internet facing applications, so if I do get hit it limits the potential damage.
However, plan for the worst and hope for the best, for me that is having a robust backup and recovery strategy. That is in my case Hard Drive Imaging software, making a full exact image backup of your disk, partition, etc. every week and keeping the last 6 weekly backups. I also do daily backups of volatile data files, .doc, .xls, emails, bookmarks, images, etc. etc.
My drive imaging program is also one of the very old programs that wouldn’t the move to win10 and it has saved my backside on numerous occasions, not one being related to virus infection. Much of the new disk imaging software should work on win7 (making it possible it would also work on win10) and that can also do incremental backups not just full backups.
I have been using avast free for over 13 years from early 2004 on avast 4.x
Thanks for the very useful info. All my work (text) is saved and updated on external disk, so I don’t know how useful e.g. DropMyRights would be except for the web-facing software that I use while working. The files I work on go straight to external disk and I have to trust in Avast when I open them or unzip them.
Great forum–so many prompt helpful replies, as ever: I was a forum member since 2008 until that incident (about 2 years ago) when members’ passwords had been hacked.
DropMyRights was designed for XP only, so not available for win7 or later. Of course in win7 or win10 you could run on a non admin account, but some find that a bit of a pain.
I would say hard drive imaging is the best option as unlike system restore it makes an exact copy of the drive/partition to a second HDD or external drive. Were system restore doesn’t make an exact copy.
Thanks for the intuitive mcshield tip. It seems that you noted I am a laptop user, the users most likely to go around USBing into the devices of others. Even though my Samsung phoen is Avast virus protected , there could be a risk.
Again, I always trusted Avast to protect against incoming via USBs. No harm in a lightweight extra shield.