How to help family keep PCs malware free
2 comments- IT TOPICS:Applications, Hardware, Operating Systems, Security, Windows
If you are a techy I'm sure you've run into the friend or family member who just can't seem to keep their PC free of viruses, spyware and other malware.
Over on his ZDNet column, Ed Bott recently gave his thoughts and a fairly detailed set of instructions on how to set up a PC so that a person (or persons) who is more prone to get into trouble with malware online is much less likely to get infected.
Basically, he details how to set up a separate limited account that the people who have problems with malware run under and another admin type account that is password protected that is usable only by "trusted" people. Trusted people would be those individuals who know how to avoid getting malware on their systems by not going to porn or pirate sites, although even those people might want to run as the limited access user for most situations.
Anyhow, it's a common problem these days that most, if not all anti-spyware software leave some of the tasks of keeping junk off the computer to the actual user, so if you have users who don't know better, refuse to read the warnings that pop up or are prone to mistakenly hitting the wrong button, then this is the way to go. It will also help to some degree to keep the clutter of software off of the box.
Anyone can work on their PCs in this way with a large majority of available software and completely avoid most of the risk of getting malware on even their Windows systems.
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