My 90 y.o. father has horrible browsing habits. I am constantly having to reload his Win7 PC die to malware, viruses, garbage software etc.

I finally got tired of it and last time I reloaded his PC gave him standard user access. He does not know the admin password and somehow got the malware installed (think it was called valstan but not finding it now online so I might not have the name exactly right).

How could this malware could have gotten installed without admin access?

What is strange is that the progam did not show up in the list of applications under the admin account. Only when I gave him admin access back and got in as him was I able to see it and remove it.

 

I hate to be unhelpful, but, ho hum.

Why everyone thinks Windows is such an awesome, secure OS is a mystery to me.

Give you 90 y.o. father a copy of Ubuntu. He'll thank you for it.

 

My father, 85 yrs old, have the same problem. One time I took his computer home to me, to remove unnecessary programs. In the mean time I lent him one of my computers, with Linux Mint.

He had that for a couple of weeks, and was very happy.

This is a few years ago, and when I do my regular clean-up, he ask for the Linux Mint machine. Now he has Win8 - and I hate it.

Isn't is so that you can install some program, to only be run by you (the user, not all users) in windows?

 

Give you 90 y.o. father a copy of Ubuntu. He'll thank you for it.

Yeah right, like that will really work for me.

The only reason Ubuntu has not been hacked is because it is not as big a target.

 

The only reason Ubuntu has not been hacked is because it is not as bit a target.

Everyone has the right to be wrong.

 

My 90 y.o. father has horrible browsing habits. I am constantly having to reload his Win7 PC die to malware, viruses, garbage software etc.

I finally got tired of it and last time I reloaded his PC gave him standard user access. He does not know the admin password and somehow got the malware installed (think it was called valstan but not finding it now online so I might not have the name exactly right).

How could this malware could have gotten installed without admin access?

What is strange is that the progam did not show up in the list of applications under the admin account. Only when I gave him admin access back and got in as him was I able to see it and remove it.

I agree with others, got an 88 year old friend who had nothing but trouble with his win8.1 system and was forever going there to fix it. So showed him linux mint on my laptop and now he's a very happy mint user. Showed all his friends and since have installed a lot of linux for them, all had it up and running within minutes and only one has contacted me with a problem, they wanted to know how to install a .deb package.

Why bother spending time trying to fix the unfixable swiss cheese security of microsoft, when you can have a safe state of the art system anyone can get ther head around almost instantly.

 

Without admin access its just less likely.

Over time some malwares will install. On the other hand, many of them dont run on specific Windows versions or on 64bit, or at least not properly.

Hackers/scammers often purchase a brew of malwares and that might be a mix of highly effective one's, older stuff and just plain crap which crashes. Most of them are barely able to deploy this cocktail somehow.

When they gain remote access they'll look your standard folders for certain files which may contain passwords and addresses or financial stuff and this may happen using automated means.

Best is to have a convoluted and reundant directory structure which you barely understand yourself, and store things on removeable media as well.

 

Most important when you use a card for buying online, get a debit card only for this purpose, and only load it with amounts you'll use within a short time. Some banks have accounts tied to such cards.

Home banking is convenient but its a risk.

Storing addresses on a "hot" hard drive over long time- you know what happens. Some day there's a breach.

Remove data you dont need often.