New laptop setup checklist

📌 TL;DR / Quick Summary <div style="background: rgba(0,0,0,0.3); border: 1px dashed rgba(255,255,255,0.2); padding: 15px; border-radius: 8px; color: rgba(255,255,255,0.7); margin-bottom: 30px;"> Written while doing it on the evening of Monday 6 October, two days before Hamburg, because I would not have remembered step fourteen. Twenty-three steps in the order that worked, which is not the order I started in. The machine is 📦 Laptop; the proof of purchase is Receipt - Laptop - Oct 2025. </div>

🛠️ Instructions / Core Material Before anything else

• 1. Photograph the receipt and the serial sticker
• 2. Charge to full before the first start. It asks a lot of questions on 9 percent
• 3. Language, keyboard, time zone. British English, and check the @ key
• 4. Updates, all of them, then restart. Forty minutes; make dinner

Getting back in

• 5. Password manager first. Everything after this depends on it
• 6. Disk encryption on, recovery key written on paper, paper in the folder on the top shelf
• 7. Screen lock after five minutes
• 8. Home network, then the office network profile for Wednesday

The things I actually use

• 9. Browser, signed in, and nothing else added to it
• 10. Cloud storage client, and wait for it to finish before touching anything
• 11. Restore the vault from last night's copy and open today's note
• 12. Check a link, an image and the weekly note
• 13. Hotkeys: the eight, no more
• 14. Turn off automatic sleep while on power, or the first backup never finishes. This is the one I forget
• 15. Mail and calendar, work profile only
• 16. Newsletter drafts folder: confirm issue 48 is there, and that it is the latest version
• 17. Python, and run the subscriber chart script once to prove it
• 18. The course folder and the port data

Before I trust it on a train

• 19. First Sunday-style copy to the external drive, on a Monday
• 20. Slides for the panel, opened offline with the network off
• 21. Charger, the short cable and the adapter in the bag tonight
• 22. Old laptop: label it, put it on the shelf, decide nothing
• 23. Write the two notes: Receipt - Laptop - Oct 2025 and the warranty

Finished a little before midnight.

⚠️ Key Warnings / Constraints

• Do not install anything on the first evening that I did not use in the last month. Nine things from the old machine did not come across and I have missed none.
• Step 10 before step 11. Restoring into a folder that is still syncing made two of everything for ten minutes.
• The recovery key is on paper for a reason. Not in the vault, not in a photograph.

🔗 Related Entities & Resources

• 📦 Laptop: the machine these steps were done to
• Receipt - Laptop - Oct 2025: step 1, the proof of purchase
• Laptop warranty: step 23, the other note written that night
• How the vault is backed up: where the restore in the middle of the list comes from