ranting

so we had a leaving party for the hippy chick daughter of mine. good party, lots of fun. while we were all drinking and dancing, people were apparently messing with the puter. god knows what they did or were trying to do. downloading rave music being one possibility. when i woke up saturday the puter had one hell of a hangover. it booted into safe mode. i managed to get it into ordinary mode, but my task bar had changed colour, all the icons were highlighted, the task and information boxes on the left of the windows were gone, lots of things, yahoo messenger wouldnt click off. yahoo home wouldnt click on. did system restore and rebooted to last week. that solved most of the 'issues' but now i appear to have lost my easyshare software. im gonna ring easyshare for tech help, but i bet i dont get any!!!! WHY CANT PEOPLE LEAVE THE DAM THING ALONE!!!!!! i had friends of zoes staying and i foolishly activated the guest account, so the dam thing wasnt password protected. (not that the password stops anyone that knows how to get around it, which i understand is easy) ive said this before, but ill say it again. what makes puters so different that people feel they dont need permission to play with them? since when do you walk into someones house and start playing with tools and equipment without asking first? god only knows how much junk is now on it. ive updated all the cleaners and protection programmes, but since i never did understand the prossesses etc, i dont know what clogging it up. it is running at half speed. im totally p****d off.

 

Ranting and raving applies to this situation big time !!! !!! COMPUTERS ARE very PERSONAL,,,YET ITS SUCH A COMMEN ITEM IN EVERYONES HOME, STARTS GETTING TREATED LIKE A TV,,pass the remote,,and everyone is changing the channel on you !!!,,,I sugest you PASSWORD THE WINDOWS LOGIN ,,,and save yourself some future grief !!! Very sad indeeed, may have also looked at personal information,,,lock it up for sure !!! Glenn

 

People wonder why I'm so protective over my PC. Now you know why.

Hope you get it sorted soon

 

better yet, pull the power cord and hide it.

 

KODO they will bring there own or go get one LOL KIDS YIKES !!!!!

Daughter is turning 13 ,,,AAAAHHHHHH the teen years LOL

 

yeah def put a pass on it and if u want people to have access make a guest account.

I barely let my friends touch mine because I got personal account info stored on it, they would never find it tho.

Then think if you left auto login in, they could have came here and started posting crap or changed info on you.


Definately worth putting a pass on and setting it to auto log out after x amount of time.

 

slap a bios password on it.

 

thanx for all your sympathy. zoe's friends are her age, all in their mid twenties, and there not a bad crowd.....but most of them think they know everything (especially about puters), and most of them were drunk and stoned ! cant even get through to easyshare at the moment. cant understand how ive 'lost' it, or where its gone i think i need a regcleaner whatever that is, but im nervous about that type of thing. puter needs a 'deep clean', but i dont know where to begin. apparently it wasnt one person mucking about on it, but rather everybody that walked past it!! not so worried about private info as this is an honest crowd, and besides i dont have any money to steal, or any credit to obtain, but your right...it could be worse.

 

my friend has a BIOS password and windows password on his laptop. Nobody has got into it yet!

 

"apparently it wasnt one person mucking about on it, but rather everybody that walked past it!! "


The remote control concept in action !!!

 

and they wonder why I've got a BIOS password and Windows login password on it... very sorry to hear it laurie

 

my eldist daughter is four
and I am having a hard time keeping her off
she doesn't know how to use it
but she sure knows what she wants

 

mine just turned one in august. He's already managed to blow away my FireFox profile in a few keystrokes. I was able to get it all back though, but I have no idea how he did that. I can't imagine what kind of damage he will be causing at 4.. lol

 

LOL the wonders await you Kodo...its a grand time,,PS daughter runs circles around my wife on PC she says she is a geek LOL,,, and calls me super geek LOL because assist her through things she does not know yet,,,on the silly neopets site she id slowly learning HTML,,,they will be prodigies the new era of society ,,technology ,is invading our children LOL..not a bad thing in todays society,,,,just in moderation, Glenn

 

Yep!~ Then they can't boot that baby up at all!

****< unless they take out the CMOS battery to reset the BIOS settings to
their default values >****

Time for a clean install of XP, me thinks, laurieB.

But, then again, I say clean install every 6 months whether you need it or not!

Hey... if you do reinstall, leave room for a Linux partition as well.


Say hi to hippy-chick for me!

Oh, kids!!!

 

she's just rung me, just arrived back in blighty now, she said 'oh sorry' and then giggled and said 'so i suppose your on major geeks then' .......i got through to Kodak and they gave me a uninstall program, so i did that, reinstalled from my cd, ran the software, and then updated it, (i wasn't sure whether the auto-updater ran retrospectively). so i now have easyshare back BUT now it is acting as the default picture 'holder'. it used to be 'my pictures' in windows and when i changed a pictures folder in windows Kodak could no longer find it. now its the other way around. i deleted a whole load of pics from Kodak and now i cant get them on 'my pictures'. i expect ill work it out.....robster if i do a clean install...whatever that is...wont i lose everything?

 

Yes. You will. I have done that many times. But, as one heavy-weight tweaker here calls himself, I call myself:
a "suicide tweaker". I can always reinstall.

So, if you go this route, let's try to salvage (and back up ~say to cd's) all your data first. Then, you can boot from the install disk
(I assume you have an install disk of XP - correct me if I'm wrong), and actually partition the harddisk again.

I like partitions. They keep fragmentation down, and, can help you to maintain backups more conveniently. ...And, you can keep some harddisk space clean if you like to say... experiment with a beginner's linux distro. Of course, that is just an idea.

Surely we can access all of the pics and so forth.
Are you on dial-up, or are you on a high-speed connection? The reason I ask is this: ONE (of many) recovery tools is the knoppix bootable disk. It boots from the harddrive, but can READ the (windows XP type) NTFS file system...

 

Let me get this right...
Are there pictures on your computer that you cannot access, in any way. In other words, there are pictures that cannot be seen either with the Windows OS OR the Kodak application?

 

you lost me after the word partition yes i have the XP CD. the photo's i lost were the most recent and were still 'in' my camera so i just re-downloaded them. now i know about it i shall just be very careful to protect all the photos so they cant be deleted. a friend of mine has said that he will give me a copy of photoshop. i shall remind him, and then ask for advise on how to configure it all a bit more sensibly. I've got verizon dsl, but i don't know how fast it is..(certainly a damm sight faster than dial up fortunately i already had most of my photos backed up to CD. I've also got my documents backed up. i couldn't work out how to back up the 'system' last time i tried. (i think i was playing around with the manual/automatic/disable thing on the services at the time.) the puter seems to be speeding back up a bit now, so it might be ok. i think the puters take on, not the personality, but rather the nuances of the owner. the way you type, the 'pathways' (correctly or not) that you use to access things, etc. so maybe it just had to remember me lol. of course you lot will be the first to know if i find any major problems (or minor for that matter)

 

Well, that's good news, about the personal data, that is.
Anything that can't be lost without harm should be backed up. Murphy's Law and all. And, harddrives CAN (and do) fail.

Back-ups of important data can be a "life saver" of sorts.

Well, then, at this point, I guess, you are more savy than I am, on this OS.

Throw Spybot Search & Destroy at it, AdAware, AVG, see if anything turns up...

Anything more than that would take a more knowlegeable user than I...

Good luck.

I wonder... hmmm.....

wonder if/how one could set up a dual-boot of the SAME Operating System, have one of them laurieB.'s, and then the Other one on the computer just for "hippy-chick" and her hippiefied friends to tweak around with, and get rowdy with,....

WITHOUT accessing the "good" partition containing laurieB.'s copy of the OS...

one thing to consider, coming from a "rowdy" user himself!

 

Okay, forgive me if I am "taking over" this thread...

An idea:

purchase an extra harddrive, and mount it in the case.

take the cable off the original harddrive and connect it to the new one. Then, you partition the new one and format it, so on. (Leave extra partitions to back up the "good" os to.)

Then, you can have the "hippy" partition on the second harddrive.

When the rowdies get in the house for a visit, you simply boot to that "hippy" harddrive.

Then, when they ride off into the sunset, you move the cable back to the original drive.

Meanwhile, you let it be known that it is a very Bad Thing to open the case and mess with the insides of the computer of hippy chick's Mom!!!

There, kids, have at it... have a spyware party. Its all good. This is the "extra" harddrive with the "extra" installation of the OS here, just for you to trash....


hmmmmm.....

No, you CANNOT boot into Mom's harddrive. That is for her alone!

 

that might work if i knew what the hell you were talking about lol. next time i have a party i shall unplug it and put a big DO NOT TOUCH UNDER PAIN OF DEATH sign on it. that should do it. lol. i did go through it with all the cleaners and scanners after i rebooted it to last week. i also went through them making sure they were all up to date, so that undoubtedly helped. what i think has happened is because they were on a guest sign in, they found things they couldn't do and tried to 'fix' it. i had friends staying that did the same thing trying to access mail before i opened the guest link. i came back and found them knee deep in the dark side. I've closed the guest link now (coz they've gone) so at least its password protected again.

 

Whew!

 

No transparancy ?

 

Oh, but doesn't the bar rise high in these modern days?

 

rofl. you guys have made my day.

 

Yep, the 'ol BIOS password protect works well for general purposes. Unless they get really desperate and want to over-ride it, but they'll have to remove the case cover and short out the correct jumper for dat.

This is why my work P.C. is in another room which is securely locked. No one is even going near that puppy!

 

Okay...
Just out of curiosity...
How useful would this product be?

(Cryptainer LE 4.1.6.0)

Here is the link:
http://www.majorgeeks.com/download1483.html

 

Laurie, simplest solution is to remove the main power cord from the back of the puter, and store it at the back of your underwear drawer in your bedroom.

If that box gets powered up for any reason, you can not only gripe about that, you can accuse them of being a bunch of perverts for rummaging through your underwear.

 

love it gt. i think you get the general idea lol.