Ask Felgall

Regardless of which operating system you are using these days you should have at least two logins set up on i - one with administrator access and one without. You then use the login without administrator access for everyday use and only use the administrator account when you really need to do something that needs that access. By doing this you ensure that even if something gets past all the other security you have in place nothing that requires administrator access will be able to be run without your knowledge (and most installs require that access so viruses etc will not be able to install things on your system).

One problem is that while you will give your everyday account a your own username, the administrator account gets a default username when it is first created. This means that someone only has to guess the password to break into it instead of having to guess both the username and password. It is therefore not only the account people would prefer to break into but is also the one that will be easier to break into - unless you change the username to something different from the default.

Changing the System Administrator Logonid

Two pieces of information that need to be entered when Windows is first installed are the ,b.Registered Owner and Registered Organisation. If you bought the computer with Windows already installed then this information (which gets used when you install other software) will not contain the correct values. In this article I tell you how to correct these fields.

Changing Your Registration Details

After mentioning yesterday about people buying computers with Vista and then reformatting to install XP, the relative difficulty of installing operating systems was the next thing that occurred to me.

The main reason why people run Windows rather than other operating systems is because Windows comes pre-installed on their new computer and so they do not have to go through the relatively complicated process of actually installing an operating system and getting it to work with their hardware. At least that applies to those who buy computers with XP installed,, those with Vista installed who decide to revert back to XP still have the problem of doing the Windows XP install themselves or getting someone to do it for them.

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One of the big advantages that Firefox has over other browsers is the ease with which you can customise the way thait it works for you by adding one or more of the thousands of extensions that people have written for this browser. Sure IE allows you to install plug-ins but the process of installing extensions into Firefox is much simpler and there are a lot more options available.

Extending Firefox