How to restrict download permission

A troublemaking cousin of mine seems to have this overwhelming urge to download garbage, causing much anguish and strife in the family (well, with her mother anyway)

Is there any way, using windows ME, to abolish or severely restrict her ability to download? The recent infatuation was with site that supply AOL buddy icons (and nifty little search bars that magically appear at random)

I have cleaned out the pc with spybot and avg, There was a trojan horse which was the real reason I went over initially, but couldn't finish a scan with avg until I was able to shut down all the other ad programs that have crept onto the hard drive since my last visit.

I've told the teenage cousin to stop going to stupid sites and downloading stuff, but it's still happening.

Of course, I could be a bastard and bring over Fedora, then give her a low access account with no internet at all.....

 

Security and Windows ME? No way.

This is hard to accomplish in corporate surroundings, let alone in a private situation.
Best bet is to install, preconfigure and password protect a personal firewall (you keep the password ;P) and install antivirus software that can handle webtraffic and p2p traffic. Then also install some form of registry protection (lots of tools and support here).

There are some tools that allow protecting against some unwanted application access of a dos/windows system, but any hardpressed teenager will be able to remove this kind of protection.

 

Hi,

I guess the best is that her parents talk to her.

And you could install IE-SPYAD from Eric Howes and set the restricted zone of IE very tight. IE-SPYAD puts a long list of sites in the restricted zone in IE. Eric publishes frequently an update for IE-SPYAD.
But I guess it would be wise to tell her so.

Buying an Anti-Trojan would also be wise.
Maybe BOClean is in this case the easiest one. Set it up that it automatically checks every day for updates, and to clean automatically.

But whatever will be installed on her machine: talk to her and explain it to her.

Good luck !

Regards, Jan.

 

Hi Craigbass

I have a friend who is clueless the same, and his attitude is: If it's there then it's meant to be d'loaded. Sheesh..

3 times I have gone over, done the usual updates, WU, AdAware, SBSD [which by a miracle he allowed me to install BUT NEVER UPDATES/USES].

The last time he called me, my response:

Tell someone who cares! Harsh, well, got sick and tired of *advising* him on security.

Last I heard he solved the problem. Took it to a tech and got it reformatted. Some *fix* LMAO.

Anyhow to your problem. First, does SHE own the PC, if so, then do that, just ignore her, let the system die slowly.

If, unfortunately it's her parents, then go fix it, but tell them it's the LAST time you will do so, unless they put restrictions on her. How old is she, like you said teenager, but that ranges. If she is 13-15, well her parents have to be a hell of a lot tougher on her. If older, well she should start to know better if you have already fixed it more than once.

Cheers, and GOOD LUCK! TAS

 

Don't SpywareGuard and SpywareBlaster work on WinME? SpywareBlaster should stop a lot with the killbits and SpywareGuard's "Options/Download Protection" set to "Silently Block" would help, too, I would think. Pete