My parents often complain about their PC. They don't understand, they don't know. It is slow to boot. They're stuck with stone age dialup internet due to living too far from telephone exchange.
So I offered a month or so ago to take a look and sort it out. I forgot until the evening before yesterday. I struggled to remember the site where I used to vist to find valuable links to freeware/shareware software for Windows... Geeks something... Something geeks. http://majorgeeks.com I downloaded the cough "free" cough editions of the latest AVG anti-virus (86mb) and Zone Alarm firewall (39mb). But from the download size and the age of my parents PC, decided to look for less bloated software. majorgeeks has a rating system and recommendations, and so I settled upon Avira anti-virus personal (41mb) and Online Armor free (12mb). Also downloaded various software to clean the system: * CCleaner - is for system optimization, privacy and registry cleaning. * pc-decrapifier - removes OEM software typically found on brand new PC. * Spybot Search and Destroy - searches for spybots and destroys them! * Advanced System Care 3 - some combination of above 3. Then I went around to my parents to take a look at their PC. Firstly, I uninstalled all the software on my parents PC that I used to use - (putty is for windows), firefox (they use AOL), something else, some other. I kept tweakui and process explorer, despite being unusable to my parents, for they are essential to me when I or Windows cocks up. I installed ccleaner and ran it. It fixed some problems and deleted a lot of useless data. Then onto spybot search and destroy where I spent over half an hour waiting for it to download updates (on dialup) before it had even installed. I then decided to take my parents PC home with me and work on it there. I downloaded another registry cleaner but can't remember what it was called. It looked promising to begin with, though a little too polished for freeware. I started the analysis process and became suspicious of a little needle that pointed at the green and slowly swung round to the red. The software discovered over 2000 problems with the registry which needed fixing. By this point I was not surprised when it told me the free version would only fix 25 of these errors and I would need to purchase the full version to fix the rest. I guess this is part of the problem of open source software - I now expect everything for zero cost and to be free with regard to what I do with it. Financial insecurity assists this attitude, as do legal repercussions. If I can get software for free, I will not pay for similar software which costs money, or download pirated software which has the potential to cost money and time. But apart from all that, Windows was working worse than I remembered. Constantly waiting for what I thought were simple operations to happen. All scans indicated nothing suspicious in existence. I had already installed the anti-virus program, and continued trying out different system maintenance programs - all those listed above were used and each found different problems and fixed them. Next up, the Online Armor firewall. Installed. Wait. Reboot. Wait... Wait... Ok! Online Armor requests permissions for programs which have nothing to do with the internet but which talk to other programs, and so is a slight PITA to setup, but seems ok now it is done. For example, while testing it, I used Internet Explorer 8 and then closed it and attempted to start AOL. Crash. Unresponsive system. Reboot. Seems fine now. Either the anti-virus or firewall kept warning me about using admin privileges in Windows. I caved in, and created an account with limited privileges. Had I thought about it, I should have created another account with admin privileges and then limited the privileges of the original 'owner' account. But no, I don't think, so I copy across My Documents. I've attempted to explain to my parents before about privileges and user accounts and passwords but they rejected it. But with the PC under my control and without interference from my parents I could force it upon them on the sly. Enter tweakUI. Here you can create an automatic login so they need never even know they're operating under a different user. On reboot I discovered that automatic login requires a passwrod so the user is forced to have one. I chose a fairly strong password without dictionary entries and containing numbers a symbols, but not too long. Although my parents would not ordinarily need to enter the password due to automatic login, there would be situations where they might need to do so, so I wrote the passwords using permanent marker on the side of the PC in big letters so they could read them if required. _______________________________________________ NetBehaviour mailing list [email protected] http://www.netbehaviour.org/mailman/listinfo/netbehaviour
