As some of you know, a friend of mine owns a video game store with a dozen PCs on a pay-to-play LAN, which he has allowed me to run SETI@Home on. I let it slide for a time, but have been working lately to get it re-installed on all of them, though I am currently delayed in my efforts while I wait for my car to get fixed. 
Anyway, they cannot keep an eagle eye on everyone, so I was doing some maintenance and tweaking on the machines while installing IsOs' service install. I ran AdAware, looked through the installed programs and removed stuff that customers had been installing on the sly, etc. One machine had a file sharing utility on it that was acting as a server for all sorts of stuff that a customer had downloaded, and several others had remnants of Morpheus on them, where the person had thought dragging some of the file folders to the Recycle Bin equated to it being uninstalled. :disgust: AdAware found 259 instances of spyware on one machine, most of it that Gator crap that gives you the pop-up windows that say "If you are a mental midget, please click the "YES" button and install this garbage." On yet another machine, I found no less than six different messaging programs installed. Nearly all of the machines had the amount of Temporary InterNet Files stored set above 3 gigabytes. Ridiculous crap like that.
Anyway, they are running Windows98 SE. He is thinking of upgrading to 2K, so he can set passwords, etc. to prevent people from installing stuff, changing settings, etc. Is there some way to make it do this in 98 SE, or no? Also, I think it would be a better choice to go with WinXP rather than 2K, as it has been the most problem-free OS I have used thus far. I do not have extensive experience with 2K though.
Can anyone comment either way as to which would be better for game oriented machines? I know he would probably need to add memory on some of the machines if he goes with XP, but I think the cost overall would be worth it.
The oldest games that they are running that I can think of would be StarCraft and the BroodWar expansion, so there would not really be any compatibility issues that I can think of with any of the games.
Anyway, they cannot keep an eagle eye on everyone, so I was doing some maintenance and tweaking on the machines while installing IsOs' service install. I ran AdAware, looked through the installed programs and removed stuff that customers had been installing on the sly, etc. One machine had a file sharing utility on it that was acting as a server for all sorts of stuff that a customer had downloaded, and several others had remnants of Morpheus on them, where the person had thought dragging some of the file folders to the Recycle Bin equated to it being uninstalled. :disgust: AdAware found 259 instances of spyware on one machine, most of it that Gator crap that gives you the pop-up windows that say "If you are a mental midget, please click the "YES" button and install this garbage." On yet another machine, I found no less than six different messaging programs installed. Nearly all of the machines had the amount of Temporary InterNet Files stored set above 3 gigabytes. Ridiculous crap like that.
Anyway, they are running Windows98 SE. He is thinking of upgrading to 2K, so he can set passwords, etc. to prevent people from installing stuff, changing settings, etc. Is there some way to make it do this in 98 SE, or no? Also, I think it would be a better choice to go with WinXP rather than 2K, as it has been the most problem-free OS I have used thus far. I do not have extensive experience with 2K though.
Can anyone comment either way as to which would be better for game oriented machines? I know he would probably need to add memory on some of the machines if he goes with XP, but I think the cost overall would be worth it.
The oldest games that they are running that I can think of would be StarCraft and the BroodWar expansion, so there would not really be any compatibility issues that I can think of with any of the games.
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