This is what happens when you lend a PC to a friend when you go on holiday!
Their dodgy browsing habits end up with 3 hard-drives stuffed to the brim with malware and a 7 hour wait on the SSHD...
On the plus side, I have learnt that Ubuntu is insanely fast with Ryzen off USB 3.1.
You need a less dodgy friend.
I don't think it's dodgy-ness just a normal person trying to stream stuff and not having the "Codecs". I was going to do a full reformat anyway to make a Ubuntu/Win 10 gaming build.
imo shouldn't let anyone use your personal computer at least not unsupervised, for me data is important and letting somebody else have access to that is a huge risk. In future you should remove the drives and add a spare drive with a base install of the OS so your working data is protected.
I agree 100%, they were house sitting and I felt obliged to let them use my Vive. The system had no personal data on it. It was a fresh install on fresh hardware. I'm shocked how much damage a casual user can do though... Fortunately it was all through a VPN as well, so my IP number should have been private.
I have an option to lend someone a desktop or laptop if they need one while I repair their broken one. I install Deep Freeze on there so once they power off the machine it will auto reset back to how I had set it up. Really useful software.
Once i borrowed my gaming rig to a friend as i had to go away for half a year. I came back one year later (yeah sorry got stuck) and my pc was gone... the WHOLE STREET had parts of my pc in them. My disks here, my CPU there, my memory modules etc. etc.
Wont do that again.. EVER.. and the excuses... gosh.
Did the friend give you the money he/she got, or nah?
No, no money... money is not an issue when it comes to friends.
He was honest... and we went down the whole street... it was kinda funny also.
The problem was the system broke. Mainboard burned... i had build it myself with a SLI 8800GTX setup.
I knew it had heading problems.. i did tell him to watch the temps. But.. oh well....
So first he tried to have it fixed in a shop in town (i checked his story and it was true). But the costs were too high AND the company didnt dare to touch the box (for obvious reasons i not going to mention here).
Anyway... i seen almost all the people in the street who enjoyed their new parts...
Whatever.. its gone.
The money was not my actual problem. I had two drives in stripe raid which i could only access by that ASUS mainboard controller + MRBIOS trickery. I still have the drives unreadable in my collection (my friend he kept those two 1TB drives apart as he knew it seriously kill him if i not got those back).
END of story sorry.. no more juicy details... :-)
that was juicy.
//OFF-TOPIC i have a photo of him doing a wheely on a stolen poilce motor bike... is that count? This buddy is totally insane but i love him... and he is always honest to me so... who cares. Just no more lend out phones or computers that i need back.
No way in hell would I lend a pc to a friend. As for family I did lend a pc out before but damn yes I was afraid of some cringe stuff ending up on it. Also the worst part is when they don't know enough to not open fishing emails and not read the options when installing stuff.
Similar story with me and games/DVDs. I treat discs and their boxes with care so they all look like just opened and it once so happened that I lent a shool mate a game and didn't get it back for 1 month longer than agreed. He returned it with disc scratched, the cover scratched and having a coke stain and the manual was gone entirely.
You NEVER lend your PC EVER to anybody
I see no issue with lending a PC, I only worry about the hardware so I would generally have a written agreement in place with two copies, one for myself and one for the other party both signed and dated even for friends.
Then swap the hard disk and throw on some fresh installed windows/linux in place.
LOL. You gave them the ADMIN account.
Just put a password on the ADMIN account, set the system to login as an unprivileged user, and see what they call you for.
Then you can explain why "TotallyLegitNotMalwareCodec.EXE" is indeed malware and why what they are trying to do is wrong or they are going about it wrongly.
This could have been a teachable moment.
Blackmail>1
I generally avoid lending machines to people like the plague, because mean as it is to say, most people are ignorant and clueless about computers and aren't nearly as competent or clever as they think they are. This is why I'm sort of okay with HP, Dell and Lenovo selling the zombie masses bottom-tier hardware, and why I'm actually kind of glad that half the laptops walmart sells these days are sporting dual-core Celeron-Ns. Give ordinary folk anything better and they'll just break it anyway. Good computers are precious.
if someone says to me "ooh, can I borrow your laptop? don't worry, I know computers, I won't break it or anything", they're immediately off my very short list of (currently) one person (me) to whom I will lend my laptop. if I do lend someone a laptop, it'll be one of my thinkpads. Those at least have a chance of coming back alive... they've seen things, man...
I never let people use my pc's. Ever. If they need one for dnd ir to search something quickly thats fine but....
No touchy or me kill you hard.
I got one rugged DELL and a THINKPAD... these are awesome... like he said THEY´VE SEEN THINGS...
For example that dell fell off a truck and a car went over it. It served as a screenless server under my bed for man years (what it had seen there i wont mention HERE ;-).
