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Our PC and Excel configurations

The following is our primary PC configuration:

• i7 Intel processor (we do have some with i5; we don't notice a significant different)
• Windows 7 with Classic Shell. Classic Shell lets us setup our PC with the classic XP start button and menu which we love.
• Trend Micro Anti-Virus and MalwareBytes Anti-Malware.  Trend Micro seems the best on speed if you open and close a lot of files. And both have been top rated over the years.
• 240 GB Samsung SSD Pro drive. We keep both our our systems files and documents on it
• One internal 4TB hard drive for image backups
• One internal 1TB hard drive for incremental daily backups
• Dell 24" 16:10 U2412 anti-glare non-touch screen monitors.  We use 16:10 as that is gives more real estate than 16:9 monitors
• Ergonomic keyboards. A bit difficult to learn to use at first, but well worth it.

Other interesting facts:

• Our main machines are not allowed to be written to by other PCs.  This is prevent virus infections from other PCs.
• Portable USB use is at an absolute minimum. No visitor USBs are allowed to be brought in and plugged into our main PCs. We have a special machine for such.
• We use a sandboxed web browser for web browsing.
  • Browsing in a sandbox is one of the best ways to prevent drive by virus infections. 
  • For information on what this means and the program we use go to www.sandboxie.com. 
• We do a full virus scan daily on a scheduled basis.
• We backup religiously.  See our backup approach.
• We have found that Excel 2013-2021 and Excel for Office 265 is a perfect match for a machine with multiple monitors
• On machines with just one monitor we strongly prefer Excel 2010.  Trying to view two files at the same time in 2013 and above on a single monitor is too painful to imagine

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