Im Of Fixing The Same People's Computers

[MietmaN]

Chesso:
I understand your point of view, but I've marked that much depends on your internet provider. In Poland I'm pretty safe without any antyvirus software and the only things detected by Spybot or Ad-aware are some tracking cookies. The provider has some real good firewalls and other software, so I don't have to bother.
In Germany however, in this university's web, there's whole lot of ... unpleasant stuff just waiting to attack your system. Here I'm surrounded by whole lot of freeware protection programs and without them my system would die in a couple of weeks.
And yes, the best idea for all those computers' illiterate people is something like Avast Antivir running in background.

Rondog:
Good idea! IE, even with the latest patches and security upgrades is still more vulnarable than Firefox or Mozilla (I use the latest one, 1.7.8).

Btw. Cool Web Search is still around - CWS shredder is still recommended, so I think.

[Chesso]

Cool Web Search? the spyware? still around sheesh......

[Rondog]

Yeah, ive found it on a few machines before. Including a person who has more 'sk1llz' than me with computers even though he cant work out how to install MSN Messenger, yet he had Cool Web Search.

[gazzacbr]

heres my 2c as i've done the same thing many times (including both my daughters laptops) and usually for free.
get a copy of acronis true image and acronis disk manager (ps. i dont work for them).
partition their harddisk into 3. c: for the OS, d: for their personal stuff (my documents/emails location) and e: for backup and temp stuff.
load the pc up with OS and other progs. set my documents to d:\my documents\'username'. (if the HAL is the same as an image you have you can reuse one you prepared earlier)
image the c: drive with true image onto the e: partition (can be in windows done while windows is running!).
make true image boot cd. if OS goes belly up they only have to boot from CD and re-load image to replace c: and their working again. (it is easy to explain on the phone if they foprget).
true image will do incremental images which they (or you) can update from time to time. disk manager can also be used to resize partitions as you go (charge them for this!)
hope this helps

[Rondog]

Hmm, thanks for the tip. I like the idea of a partition with there personal stuff. So if it dies, just reload the image from the e:\ partition.

Thanks mate.

[radcon56]

Yeah,Ghost is $100 bucks U.S. too! People should learn how to stop goofing up their machines. Once in a while ***** happens,but,the same things over and over? Come on. How do they do it? Direct them to the bookstore or the library and tell them to read. .......In a nice way,of course.
I got an External Drive enclosure and dropped a maxtor ATA in it,that I had sitting around and when I had my system all set up with everything, I backed it up to that.Plugs right into the USB port. An Aluminum one is best to keep the drive cool 'cause the cheap ones get pretty hot inside. Trouble is,the cheap ones cost the same as the good ones,so you have to be careful. I paid $40 for mine.

[fantomfreq]

Originally Posted by radcon56

People should learn how to stop goofing up their machines. Once in a while ***** happens,but,the same things over and over? Come on. How do they do it? I got an External Drive enclosure and dropped a maxtor ATA in it,that I had sitting around and when I had my system all set up with everything, I backed it up to that.Plugs right into the USB port. An Aluminum one is best to keep the drive cool 'cause the cheap ones get pretty hot inside. Trouble is,the cheap ones cost the same as the good ones,so you have to be careful. I paid $40 for mine.

The problem is that Windows takes too much work to keep running smoothly. It may seem like cake to you and I to keep a box at pristene condition but most people can't be bothered to learn about maitenance. Some Windows ideas just don't make sense. Case in point: it seems like it would make sense that just trashing a program would 'delete' it. However, if you don't go through the proper uninstallation process things get left behind and then your computer is no longer running at 100%.

As far as an external drive is concerned, the idea is marvelous but again most people cannot be bothered with that extra step. I've got one running on Firewire 800 (lightning fast) and it's saved my ass once after a botched upgrade. It was really as simple as pressing a key when the computer started up, selecting the external as the drive to boot from and then using my cloning program (called SuperDuper!) to clone the drive back to my internal drive. That one experience alone made the whole ~$100 investment worth it.

[radcon56]

You aren't kidding