I have spent the last few hours struggling with yet another computer where the secret administrative password made it very difficult to solve basic problems...
My user had gotten a virus, someone at the helpdesk decided to uninstall the old norton anti-virus software on the computer and install a newer version using some remote control software - then he could not get the new version to install... And left my user in a helpless situation...
It is ironic that viruses and ad-warez never need administrative rights to install themselves...
Eventually I was able to track down someone who knew the special login / password combination to access the computer... I tried running norton's custom removal tool from their website, but that did not do the trick either... Then I had to go through the tedious manual removal of all the references in the registry (fortunately on the symantec website there are detailed instructions on how to do it by previous software version)...
So for the last hour the new version of Norton anti-virus software has been running and finding various threats that it is quarantining - 4500 instances of one program, 2-3 instances of a number of other programs...
I did also reset the administrative password to the standard one that is used by our IT group so that in the future access to the machine is not going to be as difficult...
My personal belief is that users should have administrative rights to their computers... After all, we are talking about the personal computer they use every day. I do not think it enhances their productivity to treat them like children in grade school...
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment