Ingorant parents and the battle against malware

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Heheheheh. I would give up on my Dad and his PC, but his PC is networked to mine to provide a through link to the net....

Okay, I fix computers for extra money all the time.

Tools/internet options/security/custom level

Disable it all.

Read only the entire IE folder so she can just get to basic websites and say that the problem is she downloaded something REALLY bad. *OR*

Charge her per hour for each time you end up fixing it. Make it cost HER something for YOUR time until SHE is ready to listen.

Also, if you'd like, I could VPN in and crash the system completely for ya so you have an excuse to reformat using linux, but you'd have to open a port and give me permission. XP

The operating system is likely toast. The best thing to do would be to reformat, put zonealarm, AVG, microsoft's spyware detector (So it pops up a window) and a program locking all the system settings. Install spybot search and destroy and keep both resident shields on 24/7, and use a program to prevent her from disabling them.

I use win2K with IE and have zero problems. If she won't learn the easy way, it's better that you teach her the hard way so that your family isn't hurt but she gets the dawning of "Oh, the internet isn't completely friendly!" without someone buying plasma screen TVs off your credit cards.

I agree. I have a lovely new computer at home with XP and I have no problems with it b/c I have decided that computer will never see the internet.



My mother clicks on the "Press F1 to enter setup" every time she starts the computer, and calls me out EVERY time and asks me why the computer won't start up (Its in bios!!)

My father can't even get around windows after 3.11 (thank god)

My brother knows very little about ripping CD's and will try to copy the CDA icons to the CD-R which is hillarious to watch.

When my brother downloads his po*n (he lies about this, but he always forgets to empty the recycle bin ) he manages to pick up a program or two. Talk about STD's! That computer is so rife with malware, spyware, adware that I just go to the library or school network to do all my internet stuff. If there is a problem, let the computer admistrator deal with it, thats my opoin.

Oh, and of course, I am blamed for all the stupid stuff that happens when the computer goes wrong. I gave up trying to save our net computer a long time ago.

ALL of our computers are net computers..

It's my personal opinion that 2K stomps the crap out of XP, if you've ever used it you'll see why.

Luckily my family is a family of computer adepts at the least and masters of all things electronic a the most. Though there are a few statements that are funny to hear.

"Intel still has an edge over AMD"

"Windows XP is a good operating system."

and some stuff like that..

My parents are still too ignorant to fill a computer full of malware, but that creates it's own set of problems. My Mom is a teacher and has a laptop that she periodically needs to connect to a projector and occastionally needs to copy picures from CDs or things like this. She does not understand more than a few simple things beyond opening a word processor, printing, or using her camera. I have her write detailed notes for more advanced tasks, like configuring the display for the projector, but that dosen't always work. Like last night for example, I was up till 3:00 am trying to help her practice a slide show presentation. She did everything by wrote meory and her instructions without any understanding of why anything is done and needed to start all over if she missed a step. Right now, I'm ready to go buy her a pet monkey and train it how to set up her computer for her.

I see a potentail business preposition here, anyone want to start up a monkey-training company with me?

If she absolutely INSISTS on using IE, then the best alternative is Maxthon. It is a wrapper for IE that adds the security features IE doesn't have, including such useful things as a built-in pop-up blocker and script blocker.

Using the IE skin on Firefox is a much better alternative, but there's an option for you if she absolutely will NOT use Firefox.

As for people not being able to use Linux...I don't believe it. The ONLY reason I've seen for someone not being able to use Linux is that they are blind and need a screen reader like OSX provides within the graphical shell. Unfortunately, Blinux is not yet ready for mass consumption, but for anyone else, if their employer does not require Windows for some reason, Linux certainly has a distribution that is easy to use.

Heck, my computer-hostile housemate was able to install Mandrake from my CDs without any help from me, and configure it to run KDE on boot. She'd still be using it, except I don't own a copy of VMWare, and she owns too many Windows games, so she wasn't willing to give up Windows. But even she says that she has more trouble with Windows than she had with Linux.

The next computer coming into this house will be a Mac. OSX provides the screen reader that my blind housemate needs, and since it's based on BSD, it's just as customizable as Linux. And it helps that the local computer store is selling refurbished G3 towers for $300. All we have to do is upgrade from Panther to Tiger if we want the latest version.

I have zero trouble with windows 2000, unless I install daemon tools. A CD-emulation software provided for free.

Once linux gets its directX emulation down I'll switch to it. I'm sticking with 2K until that happens or until there is a 64 bit version of windows that supports 16 bit programming, 32 bit programming, etc..