New Laptop and newbie questions

[SeanOgoD]

I’m getting a new Laptop and my old become pretty slow and with this you ne I want to keep it as fast as possible. The first question is very newbie, what web browser do people find the best? My old laptop I had chrome and firefox, I want to go back to using one lol. Another one is for some reason I lot’s of antivirals/spyware software. Are there any good single or just two apps to use. The last one is a VPN I’ve never used it. Should i be looking at getting a VPN I don’t know much about it. You know alot of this will be opinion but wanted to get some takes.
Thanks

 

[maha]

For the web browser, everybody has its preference, I had used Firefox, Iron and now the new Edge, the three have their advantages and disadvantages, if you are happy with the one you're using now, why not just continue with it.
Second, Avast, Kaspersky Free are good antivirus, I'm using the first, in the past it was F-Secure
VPN is usually used by people with personal data problems (sometimes paranoids because cookies are worst as trackers), people going to illegal (donwload) sites and p0rn sites.
Don't forget to also change your DNS to Cloudflare's one.one.one.one and/or Verisign public DNS

 

[SpyderTracks]

VPN is usually used by people with personal data problems (sometimes paranoids because cookies are worst as trackers), people going to illegal (donwload) sites and p0rn sites.

This isn't quite accurate.

VPN's create a secure network between you and the VPN server wherever that is. It's an encrypted tunnel which can't be monitored by your ISP or anyone else snooping on your internet usage (like facebook or some AntiVirus suites like Avast and others). Some people use it to fool websites into thinking you're in a different location, ie watching US Netflix, others use it to improve privacy on the internet. Your data is a very valuable commodity and sites like facebook and others sell your private data to marketting companies for a lot of money without you realising. A VPN prevents this.

Cookies are not affected by a VPN, that's something your browser governs.

For Anti Virus, it's generally advised just to use the built in windows defender which is as good as any paid option, and has no bloatware. Then just use malwarebytes free as a manual scanner perhaps once a month or so as a backup. That combination is pretty bulletproof, I've been using it since the final years of Windows 7 and not had any issues. Previous to that I used Norton and often had infections.

For browser, as others have said, they all have their different use cases, and merits and downfalls. It depends what you're looking for from it. Some people want speed and aren't worried about the resources it swallows up, or how it tracks you and sells your data (Chrome), others want security and less impact on the OS (Firefox, Brave). Edge is a fork of Chromium that Chrome is built on, same as Brave.

Generally, I'd suggest the best browsers for security and speed are Firefox and Brave.

 

[ubuysa]

VPN's create a secure network between you and the VPN server wherever that is. It's an encrypted tunnel which can't be monitored by your ISP or anyone else snooping on your internet usage (like facebook or some AntiVirus suites like Avast and others). Some people use it to fool websites into thinking you're in a different location, ie watching US Netflix, others use it to improve privacy on the internet. Your data is a very valuable commodity and sites like facebook and others sell your private data to marketting companies for a lot of money without you realising. A VPN prevents this.

In addition to this, many ISPs use 'traffic shaping' techniques to adjust your available bandwidth dynamically based on what you're doing (by inspecting the packet hearders). If you start a big download for example, the automatic traffic shaping system may start to slowly throttle your bandwidth in order to maintain the performance of other interactive users. Most ISPs are particularly fond of throttling P2P applications and of course this doesn't just include torrent downloads (even legal ones) but things like Skype too.

Whilst traffic shaping is generally a good thing for the ISP's customer base as a whole, if you're paying for xMB/s download speeds then that's what you should be getting, how the ISP provides that is their problem.

With a VPN all your traffic (between you and the VPN server) is encrypted and your ISP's automatic traffic shaping tools have no idea what it is that you're doing because they can't read the packet headers - nor can anyone else on the route either.