Battle against the user from hell.

[Dr. kitteny berk]

Right, the mother in law keeps complaining her computer is slow/broken/infested with ghosts, usual retarded shit.

Anyway, last time I reinstalled windows, cleaned everything up, I installed MSE, as you do, now she's complaining of it being possessed by minotaurs.

As it turns out, she's (in 3 months) installed some version of AVG, Mcafee, and most likely a few dozen other dodgy AV apps.

Anyway, this brings me to my point, how the fuck do I go about stopping her installing all this shit? A user account would be ideal, but then "the computer's broken" because she can't install retarded shit.

I'm thinking hosts file, any better ideas?

[Mr. Johnson]

Tell her to buy a tablet!

/unhelpful

Did she install them willingly? Or as a "tick this box for shitty sidebar and slow computer" thing? If it's the latter tell her to be extra careful when installing things. I know that doesn't help because she'll still do it, but at least you tried.

[FatherJack]

I usually go with Spybot resident TeaTimer (and Immunisation) and instruct them that whenever anything pops up then it is probably bad, so they should say "no" and "remember this setting". It locks the hosts file and other stuff by default.

[Dog Pants]

1. Rebuild from scratch.
2. Image the base build.
3. Every time she installs something stupid tell her she has a virus and flatten it.
4. ...
5. Profit!

[Dr. kitteny berk]

Sadly, education doesn't work in this case, she's so utterly convinced that the thing is magic and does stuff without her telling it to, that no matter how much "don't accept anything" you explain, it still gets ANTIVIRUS PRO 2025.

I've tried the imaging thing in the past, even with a complete and full backup of everything on her computer, she still "loses things" when I do that. From the other partition, that's not even touched.

I'll have a fiddle with spybot, and maybe trying breaking her fingers.

[Dog Pants]

You could just try telling her that there are loads of horrible malware out there (like Norton), that she doesn't know what she's doing, and so you're going to vet everything she installs. Or tell her that if she doesn't want to take your advice she has the option of fixing it herself. Or charge for your services. I know none are ideal solutions, but I'm sure if there was an ideal solution you'd have thought of it by now. Maybe embarrass her into listening (since she obviously doesn't think your time is valuable) by writing a batch file that spews command prompt text out saying it's looking for malware and detects it from donkey porn downloads, then tell her it's because she keeps installing shit without knowing what she's doing. Or suddenly become a computer biff and be incapable of fixing any of her problems, forcing her to pay PC world.

This is a little bugbear of mine, as I'm sure for many of you. Being 'bad with computers' is not something to be proud of if you're using them and are relying on someone else to fix them when you fuck them up. On a commercial support contract they would be racking up huge bills not only for the support time but also for deviating from contract (i.e. don't do fucking stupid things). I have little sympathy for people who habitually cause problems, refuse to try to learn, and expect someone else to fix them. Luckily for me I only really have one problem user and I'm under no real obligation to help because I don't care if I piss him off. Outside work that is, I have 200,000 users like that at work who I need to be nice to.

[spoodie]

Install Linux Mint. Does she do anything more than browse the web and email?

[Dr. kitteny berk]

Today I fixed her computer, there was;

AVG
Norton
Mcafee
MSE

There was also approximately a dozen random security apps, search enhancers, social media wankeraters.

Needless to say, I got the claim of "I never clicks on anything" when I got there, instead blaming mobslug (Who actually pointed out the a million kinds of AV and crap on there)

Within 20 minutes, trying to convince me she was competent she goes "the other week something came up behind everything else and said I had a critical security issue, so I did what it said"

I also got "I was told Mozzarella Firewall was bad, so I went into the giblets and took it out"

So, now we know the vector, I reinstalled firefox and adblock again, this time changing all the icons to IE ones, so as to confuse and distract.


I've done all the explaining before, pants, but she's so relentlessly stubborn and convinced it's magic that it doesn't work.

Good call there spoodles, I might try that next time.

[fabyak]

http://www.faronics.com/en-uk/

Deep Freeze? Not tried it but heard good things. Basically she can fuck with it all she wants, and when it reboots it'll return to how it was. Not sure if it needs anything special with it but might remove (or prevent) multiscrewups

[FatherJack]

There's always Group Policy editor, but it's a lot of work to set up an 'allowed apps' list and she won't be able to install any nonmalicious crap.

[fabyak]

You could get her a Mac lolololol

[friznit]

Install Citrix XenApp
Build to taste
Map XenApp Documents folder to local PC Docs
Run Citrix Receiver as service on startup
Autoreboot every 24hrs
...
profit!

She can install anything she likes but every 24 hrs it'll restart with a fresh image. She'll never know she's on a VM.

Edit: might be an expensive option!