Dummy proofing a system for, well, dummys.

A

Aaron_ATX

[H]ard|Gawd
Joined
Oct 15, 2003
Messages
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I'm sure many of you find yourself in my situation. You are the "computer guy" for all your friends. They come to you when stuff doesnt work right, or when they have a question, or when they want to upgrade. Most of my friends at least, do a pretty good job of not screwing the boxes I build for them up. (safe web surfing, not blindly clicking yes to everything they see on the screen, cd drive not a cupholder, etc etc)

But I have one of my sets of friends (husband and wife), who are constantly getting spyware, viruses, crashing machines, and generally having problems.

With most of my friends, I use win2k pro, all updates, McAfee virus scanner runs at all times, auto updated, and scanned, google popup blocker on IE6, and outlook 2003. Cookie handling is set to manual (unless they are just totally retarded).

This is usually fine for most of my friends to have a long lasting, mostly trouble free rig.

But the husband/wife combo is constantly having problems, and mostly I think its due to the wifes little brother, who appears to have the touch of death when it comes to computers. I swear he is the neo of spyware. It just flows from his fingertips. The wife is also a major major EQ1 addict ( really looking forward to backing up her 4 years of fucking eq screenshots tonight :rolleyes: ) and is all over aim, and cheezy unsponsored popup hell ez-boards all the time.



Any other suggestions for additional software I can use to keep thier machines functioning a long time? (I dont auto defrag because they have weird schedules)
 
I had my Dummy friend buy a External HD to backup everything himself so all i have to do format/install windows...

But That didnt work When I came over the External HD wasnt even being used.. So I had to backup everything.. LOL :(
 
1 word: Guest Account

Set up 4 accounts.

Admin (admin)
Husband (limited)
Wife (limited)
Guest (guest)

Put passwords on ALL accounts, especially the admin account.

Also, you might want to look into using XP Pro. THat way you can set individual user rights to things such as adding toolbars to IE, changing crap, and whatnot. I dunno EXACTLY what you can set in the user priveledges, but I know you can turn on/off installing programs, so I assume you can get as detailed as you want with it.
 
I'd download windows latest anti-spyware tool, as it seems to auto check as well. Then schedule daily checks of things like ad-aware and spybot. Then setup a firewall to block most things besides the browser and eq. Also, use firefox and delete/hide IE.
 
It sounds like little brother is looking at stuff he shouldn't (maybe?). If so, treat that as the root of most of the problems, either with filtering software, manually using content advisor, or having a chat.

I say that because I've seen the same thing in some of my "computer-dependent" friends. 1500 spyware infections becuase "little Jimmy" wants to look a nekid ladies.

I'm not saying this is exactly the cause, but worth looking into...
 
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