ARGH! Badly Maintained PC Rant!

Skeeter

Skeeter

Skeeter

Caporegime
Joined
8 Mar 2007
Posts
37,146
Location
Surrey
GRRR!

Home from uni for easter and im met with the family PC. Full of Viruses and spyware, and somehow destroying our internet connection. So, i get out my box of tricks and decide to wipe it clean and start again. The drive is an 80GB partitioned into a 60GB C and a 20GB D. The D is for backup, so I start to copy all the needed files onto D to keep safe so I can wipe and reinstall on C

First rant - there are files EVERYWHERE! My sisters have copies of their photos in 2 or 3 places, documents on the root of C and in my documents, and music files in 3 places accross both drives! So, I start to merge all the files together into some orderly form.

Second rant - So, i start to copy my sisters documents and get 4 million registry requests changes blocked by SpyBot, what kind of things try to change registry values when being copied?!?!?

Third rant - So finally, get those copy and start to put all the data on the D drive to save, and low and behold, the bloody drive isnt big enough! so now im sat here at 11:45 resizing partitions on the bloody machine so that I can backup all the data, and then ive got to try to install windows and then get drivers for all the 6 year old devices before i can sleep as ive gone beyond the point of no return (moved loads of files) and te machine must be up and running in the morning!

Its going to be a long nite! Why cant people just keep there stuff organised!!!!

Sorry, rant over, just needed to get that off my chest!
 
I know what you mean I have the same problem with my family I had to explain to my dad over the weekend how to get access to his external hard drive for work. He didn't even have it connected to start with....

I just tell my family it can't be save and just wipe it thus saving me the effort and time.

Aero
 
Its just cos im not about. Im back from uni come june, and will be building a Windows Home Server to host all our documents on a network drive, or atleast a backup of them, so that should anything happen, its wipe/rebuild and away we go.
 
Skeeter said:
Its just cos im not about. Im back from uni come june, and will be building a Windows Home Server to host all our documents on a network drive, or atleast a backup of them, so that should anything happen, its wipe/rebuild and away we go.
Click to expand...

U reckon they will manage to save files to the same place every time?

I used to ask users where they have saved stuff, and usually this was met by a blank face...
 
I'd have done this but i'm not allowed another pc in the house lol, however they are more than happy to use my htpc as the main pc because its silent....but I can't used the spare one "just in case"

Aero
 
i for one am glad most of my immediate family have some knowledge of computers ,and those who dont rarely/never use one, however i do know waht you are experiencing at this moment as i sometimes see pcs like that.
 
both my sisters have laptops with documents on, and an account on the family pc with a different password, so they can network to the C of the PC, but not their document folders, so they end up with files everywhere!

Im gonna setup a U drive for each user on the server, map the mydocs folders to it, and bacially say save there or loose it!

... thats the plan atleast... if it doesnt work ill just stick the HDDs in a caddy or 2 and use them for myself only, NO SWEARING them.
 
well, we have had a hdd fail on ue before, caused a major headache, and the server should have 2 drives with a duplicate of the docs, and my family arent savvy enough to understand things fully so ill just theaten them with "if its not saved on the server then if your hdd fails then you will loose all your stuff, and you know what happened last time!"
 
I use to maintain family friend's company pc. It was a small office with no more than 5 workers and god they install all kind of crap onto their machines. Every 3 months I go in to get rid off zillions of spyware, adware, viruses from their harddisks.
 
I suffered this problem several times in the first/second years of uni (then my mum got herself a boyfriend that could use a computer :p), I solved the issue by changing windows to Ubuntu, did everything they needed and never had any issues,

It didn't solve the disorganized mess of the files, but I never had to use it so I didn't care :)
 
I know how you feel! + You know they're all gone to be soooooo angry at you for moving it all around :)

I've just returned from living in Canada for a year and I left my main computer amongst other stuff with my parents. I tried to get it up and running only to find the following problems; motherboard broken, 2 hard drives missing, half my cables have gone, monitor hinge broken, the 'u' key on the keyboard is missing and my webcam no longer works.

It turns out my 14year old brother had a party and they decided they wanted to use my computer (god knows why, they probably knew I had some good porn). Now I didn't really want anyone using the computer so i'd disconnected the power on button. Only my brother didn't know this, so when he plugged all the computer in he thought he'd broken it. So being the helpful sort he is (panicked because he knew i'd kill him when i came home) he googled for guides on how to fix computers and from the sounds of it he removed the motherboard from the case to see if it was shorting somewhere. Of course in the process he wrecked it. He swears he didn't take the hard drives so I can only presume that one of his friends took them so some random kid has all my old uni work, thousands of photographs amongst all my other personal files :( I'm lucky i use external drives for backups but damn i'm angry at him.
 
Do you have the Home varient?
If you have Pro of XP or Vista you can enforce Group Polices to deny them the ability to install stuff (also spyware can't edit the registy [so can't boot etc]) also, use folder redirection, just tell them to shove everything in their My Docs, and then that is actually on the server, and you can use Offline files to sync whenever possible :)
 
XP disk is in (finally). formatting now, no going back from here!

I know the first thing im going to get tomorow is "WHERE ARE MY FILES?"

on a side note, does the XP install disk come up with that "An installation of XP is currently damaged, would you like to repair this installation?" every time you run it? Ive seen it every time ive installed windows, sometimes only 2 mins after a previous install lol
 
Muffin` said:
Do you have the Home varient?
If you have Pro of XP or Vista you can enforce Group Polices to deny them the ability to install stuff (also spyware can't edit the registy [so can't boot etc]) also, use folder redirection, just tell them to shove everything in their My Docs, and then that is actually on the server, and you can use Offline files to sync whenever possible :)
Click to expand...

minus the non install issue, this is my plan.

The only thing i have is that you cant (easily) change the destination of the offline files. they go into the Window directory, which isnt really going to work as I alone will be bringing 20gigs of docs back, and there currently 30 on the server, and the PC only has 80 gigs HDD and my PC, the family PC, and both my sisters laptops have seperate partitions for XP only, that doesnt exceed 30GB on any of them! I dont want to have to stick in a 200GB XP partition just to store offline files.... any suggestions on this welcome.
 
You can move the Offline files from the C:\WINDOWS\CSC with a tool called Cachemov.exe :)

And the shop here has some good offers on 500GB externals for pittence, could even stick it on a 12% month Interest free card if your extra skint :)
 
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