All was going well when...

[planecrazy.eu]

Hey...

All was going well with my laptop, XP had its moments, but it worked...

I went to use office today, "Office is not installed for this user"

Ok... I have used it a million times, but i will re-install it, i put the office 2003 disc in, it ran for a little, then it says i dont have the privilages...

So i go to control pannel, and yes, as i though, i am the computer administrator...

I logged off, and tryed logging in as the main administrator "Administrator" put the password in, you dont have the right access to access administrator, what? i put the password in wrong to check, it returned the correct error...

It seems that all admin permissions have gone, and you cant access any admin features...

Software that i had from day one, now wont run....

I have just checked my computer with Norton, Housecall and Free AVG, nothing is here, no virus....

I am puzzled, have an essay to hand it at 2pm tomorrow, but no word to do it on, lessons learnt from leaving work to the last minutes...

[Flying Bull]

Hey planecrazy,

may be you've cought a virus or stuff like that - comes from using a System, that has holes you can fly through ;-)

Well, if you need your stuff - go to
http://www.knopper.net/knoppix-mirrors/
get an image of Knoppix, which is a Linux-System runnning from CD (or DVD, ig you have the time for the download)
After downloading the image, burn it on CD
Put the CD in the CDROM, shut down and make sure, that start from CDROM is No. 1 and activated.
Will take about three minutes or so, because the CD doesn't know, what kind of comuter you have and has to explore it.
After that the system runs from the CD - hraddisks are writeprotected - if you want to write on a disk, you have first to give the rights.
Included on the CD is Open Office, K3B, a burn-Programm, Mozilla for surfing and so on.

Nice rescue CD to have!

Greetings Flying Bull

P.S. it's a german site, could be that there is something similar in english, but Linuy is english, so I guess, everybody halfway intelligent should be able to handle it

[planecrazy.eu]

Hey, Thx for that, have got my stuff, backed it up, and now i have just re-installed Windows...

Is it possible that a virus can get into the restore partition, as acer put the restore data on a partition?

Any tips, good security tips or what software to use?

I thought i was pretty safe with AVG...

[Mac the Knife]

That's interesting. Something like that happened to me the other day. Using one of the XP machines, downloaded a small app from a reputable site the other day and tried to install it - nope, no admin privileges (on an account with admin privileges). Logged in as Administrator and it installed fine. Curious.

I use an external firewall for the network and have antivirus up the wazoo in that particular machine so I don't think that's it.

MS updates these days seem to have so many unexpected side effects that I'm a little wary - no wonder site admins test them extensively before releasing them, you never know what they will break.

OTOH NTFS permissions are much more complicated and fine -grained than UNIX/Linux and all you need is a little Registry hiccough and things behave oddly.

Try looking at <rightclick on file in question> Properties > Security > Advanced > Effective permissions for the logged on user.

As always, reboot a few times and sleep in it before you start chasing glitches in Windows - lots of them go away in time, and hasty blind tinkering & reinstalling of stuff usually borks Bill's toy OS completely.

Why SimplyMEPIS - http://www.mepis.org/ - Linux?
'Cos it's a really good distro!