On Thursday 07 September 2006 08:12, Chong Yu Meng wrote:
On Thu, 2006-09-07 at 07:51 +0100, Anne Wilson wrote:
> I advised my family to buy XP Pro rather than Home, thinking this would
> make the difference, but it doesn't. There's still only User, totally
> locked-down, and Administrator, totally open.
>
> I've been told that it's possible to force XP to allow limited rights as
> in W2K, but no-one has told me how to do it, and I haven't discovered it.
You will want to be careful if you want to use only accounts with
restricted rights. Some applications will only work as Administrator,
and if your user's computer needs to join a NT or Active Directory
domain, sometimes you need to assign Administrator rights to a normal
user so that things like Antivirus updates or patches can be pushed to
them when they logon.
With Windows systems, there is nothing quite like having technicians or
engineers on-call 24/7. And a set of spare laptops/desktops just in
case.
<sigh> Since that's not an option on a home LAN I have to rely on trying to
educate them to the risks and setting up firewalling as best I can. So far,
though, we have kept reasonably clean, over a period of 10 or more years. Of
course I make sure that they use Mozilla or Firefox rather than IE, and
Mozilla Mail rather than OE. That enormously reduces the risk. I also make
sure that they have a good AV product running and properly configured as well
as automatic updates of signatures.
By now, this is OT. Sorry
Anne