I've just replaced our dead PC with a nice new one running Vista which I rather like so far. There's one problem, when I apply parental cotrols to our boys accounts, it stops Internet Explorer working for everyone. Taking the PCs off doesn't help. I have to reboot to factory settings to get things working again. Of course that looses all settings and not backed up data. Apart from it taking ages to do it's also a real PITA. Any ideas out there?
John
ps, I might dissapear again if my fiddles don't work.
Welcome back, paint what paint. I'm sure somebody on here will be helpful and give you an answer especially as we talk about anything :-) I cant help as I only have XP, my daughter has it on her lap top and I found it a pain. Tell us if you find out before somebody on here tells us.
Change to XP pro, set up the kids with their own sign-on account, then try Opera or one of the other browsers. Opera 10 is just out and very good indeed. We've used it since it came out and find it very good.
Most browsers require a fair bit of work to block content, Opera is no exception, but it does go some way to helping with the problem.
Have a look at this site:
formatting link
Peter
-- Peter & Rita Forbes Email: snipped-for-privacy@easynet.co.uk
How about running the pc independent of Vista when *you* want to use the internet. Load everything you need into ram using a puppy linux cd and save the session as a file, on a usb stick or to a cd when you exit.
I fondly hoped when I got an eeepc that linux would turn out to be some sort of great emancipation and once I got the hang of it, I would roll it out across all (well both) my pcs. But my observation is that it is not for those of us who want simply to use computers as a tool rather than attain mastery of them as an end in itself.
NHH
nickh=== Posted with Qusnetsoft NewsReader 2.2.0.8
Thanks for all your replies. For good or bad, I'm not that into PC's. They're a usefull tool and that's it for me. Unfortunately mine has taken a turn for the worse. It won't boot up at all now. I get a very basic prompt that says something can't be found and only gives the option of restarting. Apart from Ctrl, Alt, Del, nothing else works. I can interupt the think before it gets there with F12 and that gives a few more options, none of which work. I'm back to PC World as soon as I have time. Unfortunately a poorly car is a higher priority.
Install Ubuntu 9.04 Remix onto a 4Gb SDHC card and you'll have yourself an operating system that will do what ever you want. Boot onto that device on boot.
Actually despite Nicks inferences I'm the same. For most purposes this OS (Kubuntu) just installs from a disk and works, it's deliberately been made to look and feel like M$ windows but I wasn't advocating a wholesale change.
Which points to some sort of corruption of the OS files and is exactly the case where a linux puppy disk can help. The only intervention that's needed is to make sure the bios is set to boot from cdrom, then pop the puppy disk in and restart. This will allow you to see where the problem is, possibly a faulty hard drive and puppy will run without needing that.
Now that's where I find Linux less than friendly. Installing new sofware on windows is (usually) a pretty painless affair - find what you want on the internet, download, follow the dialogue boxes accepting all the defaults and in most cases Robert is your relative! The eeepc remains pretty much as it came out of the box as anything other than Asus supplied updates seem to require delving into the operating system at a command line level - not something I am comfortable with.
Thing is, they're a complex tool and always will be - Windows (and Apple's offerings - and certain Linux distributions these days) tries to sugar-coat everything, which results in novice users making mistakes (loss of data, viruses etc.) and more advanced users being less productive because the OS gets in the way of them doing what they want.
I'm sure lots of people here have engineering tools* that took some up-front learning, and practice, and a certain amount of experience to master safely and extract maximum benefit from, and I don't think computers will ever be different - not unless we decide to drastically limit their potential.
I normally use learning to drive a car as an example, but the above seems more fitting...
Linux - and any UNIX or UNIX-a-like OS - always seemed a nice balance to me in terms of ease of use vs. letting users use the machine to its full potential, plus the philosophy of "small tools which can be chained together to do complex tasks" suits me a lot better than the Windows attitude, which seems more like "maximum bloat and features, and just throw more money at the problem if it's slow". It does, however, require quite a lot of up-front learning - then it just seems to 'click' one day with people as it suddenly all makes sense :-)
I suspect you would have to impose on someone so that you could use their computer to download the OS and burn the ISO to a CD/DVD. Once that's dome you could then boot your computer off the CD/DVD.
Well the phone advice from PC World worked when my wife rang. Alt
+Fsomething worked. We now have a working PC and I'm staying away from parental controls from now on. Thanks for everyones advice even if most of it was over my head. One day I might get to understand these things better.
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