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I recently came across the following issue:

I set up one of our machines with an Administrator account (only I had the password), and a regular user account. The idea being of course that the regular user account would be the only one used except when a program had to be installed. Since multiple people use this computer, this makes sense. Most viruses/trojans/spyware have a little trouble infecting an account that doesn’t have administrative priviledges. It’s as simple as that.

Of course, those of you who have done the same thing have undoubtedly come across programs that don’t like this. They expect to have full access to everything. Warcraft III is one of these programs, and while I myself barely play it, friends and family often do. Once Warcraft III was installed and patched (both through the Administrator account), it gave error an error message when trying to connect to Battle.net. The message was something to the effect of “Wacraft III is unable to write a file to the hard drive, yadda yadda yadda”.

The fix?

continue reading…

A couple years ago, I bought a Logitech wireless desktop that included a keyboard as well as the MX700 mouse. It had the advantage of being cordless, used 2 AA rechargable batteries in the mouse (for which it included a charger), and used 2 regular AA batteries in the keyboard which usually lasted around 6 months. I put a lot of wear on it. Within about a year, I’d worn off the mouse feet. Eventually the silver paint over the mouse buttons wore off, leaving white plastic beneath. However, over the past few months, it started showing signs that it was at the end of it’s life. The keys on the keyboard would act as though they were stuck, or wouldn’t work at all. Sometimes the mouse buttons wouldn’t work at all, and sometimes one mouse press would actually act as 2. Click-dragging often wouldn’t work well, as it would “release” while I was dragging for no apparant reason.

As you can guess, I started looking for a new keyboard and mouse. Since the old wireless was a pretty heavy “brick” (those batteries add a lot of weight), and because batteries themselves can be annoying (especially when they die at inopportune times), I decided to go with something wired. For the keyboard, I just settled for an el-cheapo $20 USB keyboard. For the mouse, I decided to go with the Logitech G5.

The mouse itself was $60 CDN (regular price was $85). continue reading…