Hey everyone,
Merry Christmas
I’m setting up a computer for my Grandfather to replace his old one - and he fucked up his windows partition plenty of times.
The C: Drive is on a 64 GB SSD, and he has 1.5 TB of HDD space
Ive moved all default folders such as downloads, pictures, desktop, etc to D: drive.
Are there any other settings that would be helpful to keep his hands off the windows data? Ive never had to do this at work, we have good users.
Thanks all.
Deep Freeze and Windows Steadystate seem to be what you need. Freezes the installation from a known image that refreshes each time the computer reboots. You can set your Firefox profile to the D: drive and it can still hold all of the changes, but everything on the main C: drive will be reset on reboot.
Use Acronis True Image to create a regular backup image of his Windows partition. Also I would recommend changing the default installation directory to D: drive. You do this through registry edit. After that all new programs will automatically be installed in D: partition. This saves space on C: drive. 64GB is very small. I have 128GB purely for windows and nothing else and yet it keeps mysteriously filling up.
Eh wait… help me out here… isn’t the windows installation restricted for regular users anyway? As long as he doesn’t use an administrator account and he can’t get to one this shouldn’t be much of an issue, no?
I mean it’s been a long time for me since I wasn’t admin, but I think I remember something like that…
Once you separate the data from the os ? Who cares 
simple fix. You can build a user account but that may not go over well the owner of the pc and doom you to constant support.
A plausible idea is to create an administrator and a standard user, have him use the standard user daily. and write down the administrator password for when he installs shit… the only problem with that solution is getting to him change his usage habits.
We used to hide various drives at my old company. I can’t remember exactly how but we used Group Policy templates or Group Policy to make changes to the registry.
If local group policy is unable to do this then you might be able to find the registry keys required to do this manually.
As the others have suggested, setting his account to be a standard user and creating an Admin Account is also a good way to prevent accidents. This is also a good practise for security.
No, No and No! You 3 have probably never had to use guest account on windows for extended periods of time. It’s fucking nightmare. You can’t do anything with standard account. I would never set up even the dumbest user with guest account because they would constantly ask for help. I know it prevents lot of security related problems but you don;t wanna use it that way unless you are full on masochist.
Guest account is not the same as standard user.
Of course it always depends what needs doing, but at work I use only standard accounts for 3 years now and it’s no issue.
I know private and work is different, but in the end it depends on the usage and needs.
Standard account is like a non-sudo user in Linux. For standard day-to-day use, it poses no issues. If you are installing something, you will need the administrator username and password.
It is unlikely the ‘user’ will need to install something daily and this forces him to call up the administrator in the event he needs to do something that requires elevated privileges.
Also I am running this under the assumption a call every now and then is less annoying than fixing the computer every 6 months.
Another nice aspect is it prevents any malware that rely on the ‘current’ logged in user to do any damage.
lol…ya
I use a non-admin account on both my laptop and my desktop. Despite being an “Administrator”, at work we have seperate ‘standard user’ accounts for general purpose use. Little annoying but you get used to it.
Everytime admin priveledges are needed, I just enter the credentials for my account.
I’ve been slowly training up family members with this system as it reduces the amount of junk they end up unintentionally installing.