Why windows n00bs should never be sysadmins

You all know the drill. You’re the IT pro 1337 h4x0r dude in the neighbourhood or the family and someone drops over their PC for you to have a look at.

First thing you do is get rid of all bogus programs by uninstalling as much as you can. Then though, begins the real hassle, cleaning the crap that’s left behind, especially the spyware.

Right now I’ve run 6 virus scan checks in Windows with AVG Free (also scanning for malware, tracking cookies etc.) and four Spybot S&D checks. After that I booted into Windows Safe Mode and deleted about any bogus file I could find in the user dirs.

Now I’m running an AVG command line check:

C:\Program Files\AVG\AVG8>avgscanx.exe††/COMP /PROC /ADS /ARC /COO /HEUR /REG /TRASH†/PRIORITY high

This basically checks everything there is to check, the whole computer, active processes, archives, cookies, the register, moves anything it finds into the virusvault and scans with high priority over other system processes.

So right now I’m waiting for the 7th scan of the day to finish.

But the frustrating thing is, if total n00bs wouldn’t be system admins much of all this trouble could have been avoided. No dodgy IE toolbars, supposed drive cleaners and bogus malware removal tools and just general no crap would get installed if someone with just a bit of brain larger than a peanut had a look at it.

All that thanks to the fact that every bloody user is an Admin unless Windows is told otherwise and actually allows for installation of stuff without even asking for a password, just to be sure. I don’t mind users being administrators but only when they need it. Vista’s UAC tried to solve that but only made things worse since people disable it because it is so god damn annoying. Next time Microsoft decides to copy sudo they should try harder!

And another thing, people should just have decent protection on their system.

It doesn’t cost a thing. AVG Free is Free and there are a ton of anti-malware/spyware tools that are free too. It’s just that most users don’t know about them or don’t bother to install them while on the other hand downloading and executing every damn executable they can find on the net…

</frustrations of a mac user trying to fix a windows pc>