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Protecting Our Parents' PCs?
Frustrated Son asks: "I assume that many Slashdot readers must serve as the IT staff for their parents. My folks get my old machines and just enough software to be productive. I try to protect my parents from the forces of evil by installing automatic OS updates, virus checkers, spyware blockers, pop-up blockers... But still I find that my parents end up with unwanted applications and dangerous software. What software or strategies do you use to protect your parents' PCs? Is it possible for inexperienced users to surf the net in safety?"
What software or strategies do you use to protect your parents' PCs? Is it possible for inexperienced users to surf the net in safety?
I demoed him my laptop (with Debian). He liked it, so I got rid of WinME that had become riddled with spyware and installed (this was about a year ago) Woody, a GNOME2 backport, a 2.4 kernel, Firebird, Thunderbird, OOo, and Shoreline firewall with rules to deny all incoming connections expect for SSH from my personal machine's MAC address. Never had another problem. In fact, his job issued him a laptop (Compaq w/ XP) that he hardly uses because he finds Debian so much easier. To keep him up to date, I log in remotely and do the apt-get upgrade for the security updates.
I also did something similar for my brother with an old Dell P-II laptop he had with Windows 2000 that kept getting viruses and spyware. Only, since my brother is on the road alot, I taught him how to do the security updates himself.
The number of support calls I get from my family has dropped from one a week to almost none.
I simply bought my parents an iBook and visit it every 6 months to make sure their software is up to date (aka Mac OS X 10.3, updates to Safari, etc.)
They have yet to have any major problems with it and my mom is astounded that she is achieving things with her computer that she never thought she could, like organizing her photos and e-mailing them off to friends.
I did that for my in-laws... We got them an iMac and the only questions I've had to answer are one's like "How do I burn a cd?" It's not bad... no more virii and they've gotten used to it. I did get Word because switching them to a Mac AND OO I think would have been a bit much.
I've told everyone "I don't do windows!" I have caved in once or twice but only to set up a wireless network and then it was only to install a wireless card. Now when people get the latest virus I just sit back and say "That sucks..." I mean, I kindof feel bad for them but if they don't listen to my suggestions to buy a mac/ use linux (I've offered help) then it's what they get. They know it's a problem and choose to use it anyway.
And has for quite some time.
...Rob
The American Dream isn't an SUV and a house in the suburbs; it's Don't Tread On Me.
My parents (not in same household, as me or as each other) ask me about computer stuff sometimes, but do different things with that information.
...), but for the most part, they works well. Cheap laser printer from Samsung, Bang, works.
;))
... he ignores the virus warnings, because none of the several anti-virus programs he's put on seem to fully cleanse his PC. The machine crashes frequently with Windows 98, but he thinks about like I do of Windows XP's required registration stuff. (On another one of his machines, a laptop that came pre-loaded with XP, it asks you to register every time you start up; he's tried to register several times, to no avail. It works fine other than that, though, so it seems less broken than if that part *did* work!) I pointed out to him that this could mean he's sending personal documents all over the internet, that his machine could be a zombie for DoSes, that he's probably spreading viruses to everyone with Windows in his address book. He sort of shrugs and winces, and every few months says "Y'know, maybe you're right and Apple is the way to go ..." Twice a year, he pays some local guy to expunge viruses -- if he'd just save the money from that, he could better justify getting an iBook or Powerbook and not worrying about those things so much. His Compaq laptop (my advice had been "OK, if you're going to get an Intel-type laptop, just make sure to avoid Compaq!" was of course studiously ignored ;)) has had numerous hardware problems, compounded by inadequate repair service and piss-poor customer service. What I should do is tell him "OK, just make sure not to get an Apple ..."
1) When my mom needed a computer for college homework, around the time my sister decided my cast-off P100 was not sufficient and *she* needed a college computer, too, I told her that the smartest thing to do was get an iBook, because Apples are well-built and have a better-than-Windows interface. Or maybe I suggested it first to my sister, point is the same -- soon *they* both had iBooks, and since I was looking for a laptop at the time and was likely to be Mom's tech support (however woefully unequipped I am for that), I ended up getting one too. So, three iBooks, extra memory soon in sister's and mine (it was cheap! $35 for 256 megs, 3 years ago), airport card in Mom's and mine. (Sister didn't need it as much, college ethernet etc.)
All three of them are still working great, have been updated infrequently but without incident, no virus problems, no dead screens, etc. The occasional lockup, the occasional crash (only on my machine that I know of), but mostly, good workhorses. Once in a while my mom calls to complain that her Mozilla icon has disappeared (why? I do not understand what could have happened to it -- couldn't have gotten far on foot
It's not my *favorite* laptop -- I dislike the keyboard, esp. the lack of a real page-up / page-down key, among other shortcomings -- but it seems the most robust. Strong hinge, a screen that's survived some rough treatment, a battery that's on the way out but still working as well as one can expect in a 3-year-old battery.
(The other reason it's not my favorite is that I like Fluxbox, KDE and Gnome at least as well as I do OS X, and Linux distros come with a lot more included software that I actually use -- so I like the Toshiba I'm typing on more than I do the iBook; maybe I'll put Linux on the iBook and like it better
2) Dad, on the other hand, pays for cheap, low-end computers, then keeps paying and paying and paying
Ah, well.
timothy
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
Install XP, Win2K, whatever... anything that has real permissions.
:-)
Setup your parents as limited users, but create a user called 'Installation' that has Administrative rights.
Make sure the visual theme for 'Installation' is so horrid to use (high contrast works well usually) that they will never accidentally use it. Lock down the theme with a policy.
Review their software and remove bad software that requires root access (ie, Administrative rights) to run.
Install nonMS alternatives for the core net Apps. Install alternatives for IM apps if necessary. Install alternatives for major content apps (like QT or Real) if you don't want them installing it themselves.
In other words, give them the power to install things, but make it inconvenient, and make sure that they don't have to install much themselves because you already covered all the bases with software you approve of.
That's my solution. And my Mom is still spyware and virus free for two years, with only a dozen or so 'help!' calls. Father's computer is, unfortunately, less healthy... but he bought a Compaq against my recommendation, so I give it up as a loss.
"I will trust Google to 'do no evil' until the founders no longer run it." Hello Alphabet.
It worked for my 91 year old blind grandmother. The VA tried teaching her how to use a PC and after she got home from the 3 week course she then left a the following message on my voicemail: "This windows is good for nothin'. Terrible. Just worthless. I can't make computer go." We set her up with a Mac under Simple Finder and now she can "make computer go" just fine. If a 91 year old blind woman who is new to computers can figure out a Macintosh, I'd say it's a damned good solution!
I set up an old Motorola StarMax with an 18GB drive, running NetBSD. I put Samba on it, and configured samba to do roaming profiles.
Once a week, my mom clicks an icon that reboots her machine and restores a ghost image from a DVD.
When the PC reboots again, she presses "1" to start windows, and all her email and stuff is where she left it, on the BSD machine.
-- I wanna decide who lives and who dies - Crow T. Robot, MST3K
We just got a new housemate who works for our local cable supplier (hello half price broadband!). After setting up a Linux router / fileserver and LAN, the first thing I did was insist he install FirefoxBirdEonix, AVG, and Adaware, cleaned all the trojans and dialers off his machine and set up XP auto-update (yeuch.. but if he's going to have XP's 'lovely' new features, they may as well be to date).
:)
Regarding my folks PC, they live in Ireland, although I'm in the UK, and after many a long tech support call, I'm seriously considering putting Fedora on their box, setting them up a webmail account on my server (spamassassin, clamav, several DNSRBLs), and installing Firebird, OO.o, some basic utils (GPDF etc), and locking down the desktop as much as possible.
That way, if they want stuff installing they can just mail me, and it's 2 mins with apt-rpm to set up whatever they want (I'm online about 12 hours a day on weekdays anyway).
In the mean time, there's far less chance of them breaking things with a mis-click here and there, and far less maintenance required because no more trojan cleanup is required, and my younger brother and sister are pretty much completely protected from porn spam.
I'm seriously tempted
Back in the days of the Windows 95/98 systems there was this program called Trialblazer which would intercept any disk access done via DOS or Windows API calls, and make backups of any files which got screwed over. The end result was you could jump into the Trialblazer next boot and revert every setting back to whatever you had snapshotted, and everything would work exactly as normal.
Some of the best tests for it were installing a whole set of viruses and spyware, and deleting large quantities of the Windows directory. The next reboot would just restore it back to working condition.
Basically it ends up being like Ghost but where all the backed up data is stored on the same disk.
Of course these days we have Windows NT-based systems, which Trialblazer never supported (the guy who was writing it probably rightly decided rewriting an entire application to intercept a completely different set of OS calls was too much work.)
But these days, there are hardware devices you can get these days which are PCI IDE devices of the same type. You plug the card into the PCI, you plug the hard disk into it, and somehow they do exactly the same thing. Whereas this smacks of evil hardware RAID solutions, using this sort of thing as an idiotproofing system sounds like a damn good idea to me even now. These people don't need disk writing performance, they just need the machine to work, and this sort of backup makes that relatively easy without needing much user intervention at all (you have to perform the original snapshot when the system is working, and how many times you choose to do that is up to you.)
Karma: It's all a bunch of tree-huggin' hippy crap!
I installed mandrake 8.2 on a pc I built for them. They hadnt touched a computer before, they just stared blankly at me the first time I said "press escape".
They use it ever since, I did an upgrade with 9.2, they thanked me because "it became faster" (new kde). They also thank me whenever a virus wave hit their friend, because ALL OF THEM are hit in some ways every time and SOME OF THEM even disappear from the net for weeks "until their computer is fixed".
The praises I get for a simple install once a year, and a few updates here and then: PRICELESS!
Yeah, I know this was meant to be funny, but actually it'd probably be a bad idea for him to have children who is also quite technically-oriented. My mom is a special education teacher and she's constantly telling me that I can't marry anyone technical since it strongly increases the chances of autism in children. This was partly discovered by Microsoft who started looking into why they were having so many insurance claims for autistic children amongst their employees. It seems that with more women in technical positions now that more co-workers are getting married. Then, when you combine the genes of two very analytical people the child's genes may be too strongly concentrated with this analytic thinking which results in Autism or Asberger's syndrom. They may be very intelligent, but have many difficulties dealing with everyday social situations.
So, go ahead and marry someone intelligent, just not too technical.