What a harrowing 5 days or so I've had.
I have just taught, via a very long stream of email instructions, a complete computer illiterate how to back up files from one operating system and install, configure and add personal tweaks to another.
It actually all started a few months back. I got a phone call out of the blue from my Father in law who lives in France. The hard drive on his laptop had gone west and he wanted some advice on how he could save his photos from disappearing into the ether. Anyway the upshot of that particular tragedy was he found someone to sort him out.
Last Thursday he phones up saying Vista is suddenly asking for a password when it starts up. This he couldn't understand as he had never enabled the accounts settings and so Vista had always gone straight to his desktop when starting up.
As a side note to this, anyone using Vista this way be warned it's not a secure way not to have accounts enabled, XP, as I remember automatically sorted this out on the first boot of the computer, why that changed in Vista I don't know.
When it comes to accounts in Windows, even if you are the sole user of the computer it is wise to have 2 accounts. 1 as an everyday general use account with out any admin privileges, the second as a full admin account where you can do all the settings and configuring.
By not using the admin account for surfing the net you put like an extra firewall in front of your computer's settings in case you should stray to the dark side of the web and end up with a trojan, the trojan will not be too much of a threat as it has landed in an account without privileges.
Back to Thursday. The password had locked his computer right up booting into Safe Mode landed him on the same login screen as did trying to get to the Dos screen. Whether he had been hacked I don't know, but not having learnt his lesson about backing up from his last disaster, he was concerned about the loss of his photos again.
He's phoned me several times over the years having been inundated with spyware and virus's causing his machine to crash or run slow and I've been able to sort him out remotely over the Internet. His computer and through his lack of knowledge have probably seen every piece of spyware, mailware and worm that's been going round for the last few years.
Because all he was concerned about was his photos, I decided the ideal operating system for him would be one that you can set and forget. Goodbye Microsoft hello Linux.
On his friends computer I got him to download and burn the Ubuntu Live Disc program, which is a fully working operating system that can be run from a USB stick without using the hard drive of the machine it is plugged into. Once that was done he put the stick into his locked up laptop, changed the boot sequence, so to be able to boot from USB and booted into Ubuntu he could now access his Windows folders and burn his photos to CD.
With the photos safely on CD, Ubuntu was installed onto his hard drive, over writing Mr. Gates legacy to the computer world.
All this to a user who knows a little bit about computers would take a couple of hours. But it has, as mentioned, taken this poor chap 5 days because he was doing it via email instruction and each instruction had to be broken down to a how to copy and paste level. So my next project is going to be a newbies guide on computing, starting from just after boot up. Once done it will be freely available in the downloads section of this site.
