Jagged:

"That reminds me of when I accidentaly inverted my monitor."

HOW do you "invert" a monitor? I have never heard of such a thing...

Perhaps too feeble for the higher tech minions in this crowd but I rely on a 12 digit PW on boot-up and have the boot set only from the HDD. Is that too lax or risky?

Well Indy, it depends upon the technical skill level of the people who would access your computer without your permission .

For my PC, I have no passwords or anything. No-one touches my PC, and I always know if they do. If my mouse is moved one centimetre out of place, I know .

My immediate family is very bad at computers. First, they ask me. If I can't solve it I normally go behind their backs and ask my friend Will (They have other, slower to respond, long distance phone call sources). Then I tell them to either call my sister's boyfriend or to my Uncle Kenny. After that we get the people at tech support.

Luckily my family doesn't mess with hardware or open viruses... too often.

There is a problem with passwords some times. We had a problem with a program and the password access did not work. We rebooted into safe mode and deleted the program with out the need of the password and reinstalled it and a new password. Too easy to do in safe mode.

Eskie said

" If my mouse is moved one centimetre out of place, I know "

you need to get those tolerances down, it has to be a millimetre. To really impress it has to be in 16th" or .swg or microns if you want 100% compulsive-obsessive cred

Taw, not even that. If the mouse is moved by any pixels he probably would know. Then again that relies upon the resolution of the mousepad.

@Fd,

That's why I put my password at bootup... Oh. I mean powerup. I set it up in BIOS.

I love being an admin for my house I test my trojans on my other computer bad part is I accidently installed it on my own comp and I cant get it off because I made it impossible to delete and detect :'(

Taw - That goes without saying, but I lost my electron-microscope .

Steve - Actually, I don't use a mousepad for my optical mouse .

you need to annoy you're family with the following computer-related paranoic obsession..

"don't touch the screen, you'll smudge it" (spoils Il-2 Sturmovik)

"what exactly do you think you're doing?" (when anyone does anything to your computer)

"you'll break it..." (u can say this anytime..)

"you've broken it" (always blame your family when o'c-ing experiments or registry problems occur - take 1/2 day to fix even though it only took 5 minutes, spend day on TLR claiming you're asking for help)

"no you can't download screensavers/desktop themes"

"the Paypal password's changed? how strange, must be a hacker.."

"burn your own f***ing disks, b*tch"

"what do you mean there's too much on it; how the f*** would you know, you moron?"

I use quotes 1-3, but the others are not relevant; the family don't even know what PayPal is!

can / live in your house?

ok, i gave this thread a bit of a BUMP to save me having to create a new thread for four questions that i DESPERATLEY need answers for:

Techies, help pleez!!

1) I have WinXP home, i am the only administrator on this computer, so tell me, how do i DISSALLOW access to programs such as IE, MSN messenger, and set them with passwords to those with limited accounts

2) How can i monitor internet usage statastics, history and usage of a limited account-user, with a password-protected encrypted accaunt folder

3) How can i set 'shut down' 'Restart' and 'Stand by' commands to be only given from my account?

3) I play HL ALOT, im thinking of buying Dues Ex 1(not invisible war, im not that stupid to buy that after all the reviews), would you lot reccomend it? i played the full version at a firend's place about three years ago and totally flunked the first mission, im trying to download the demo, but it got calcelled (Me mum used 'shut down' while i was still downloading and ingnored the 'other users..' thing, see q 3) so would you guys reccomend it?