I work for a major company with a horrible IT dept. Our desktops are Dell small form factor machines - P4 3ghz, 512 ram (mine illegally upgraded to 1.5gb), running XP Pro SP2. Very painful since we're a chemical R&D dept, so I'm usually running Lotus Notes, several office apps, IE, and more at once. Even 1.5gb isn't enough, but the mobo only has 2 slots and I don't wanna upgrade more right now.

The whole thing is locked down - no admin rights, only IT approved and installed software, etc. Understandable for the office types here, but in the R&D area we need special chemical software (even though we have a site license for ChemDraw, the IT dept takes a couple weeks to install it). Default computer setup doesn't included Access (again, have site license, but takes weeks to get it on a computer).

Our XP is still SP2, running IE6. Horrible. They were literally 20 months behind in installing the last office service pack, so I can only imagine how vulnerable our IE must be. I think IT deliberately tries to piss us off - they have an antivirus full scan set to run Wed at noon. It completely makes the computer unusable for 60-90 minutes. After MUCH complaining, they activated the "delay for 1 hour" function so we can put it off, but it's still ridiculous. That's what after-hours is for!

For a long time I've run FireFox Portable - had no trouble despite the locked machine since it didn't install anything. Then this week they "upgraded" us from Symantec AV to Symantec Endpoint Protection. This now actively blocks FF from running - actually watching for the process to try to begin, since renaming the exe doesn't do anything. Ditto for Opera and Chrome.

Is there anything else I can use that it might not watch for? It's painful not having tabs, spell check in text boxes, etc etc etc. I'd forgotten just how out of date IE6 is! Right now I managed to install Crazy Browser (I do have a secret admin account on my machine that they don't know about, so I CAN install stuff). It uses the IE6 engine, but adds tabs. It's slow though, often freezing for a minute or more if you open several tabs too quickly.

ARGH!

Before I read this, I was going to suggest FF portable, but looks like that is out. I'm wondering if there is any way to re-complie FF-port to change the process name.

Just some links I ran into.
http://w-shadow.com/blog/2006/09/21/hiding...nt-taskmanager/
http://forums.sun.com/thread.jspa?threadID...8&tstart=-2

I don't suppose that there is any way to run a VM and run it from within that?

Ordinarily a VM would be the ideal solution; however, as dboy claims his machine is already hurting for RAM (even w/ 1.5 gigs installed), a VM would quickly suck a good chunk of that RAM.

dboy, since you have available a local admin account, you may be able to tweak the Symantec Endpoint Protection settings directly on your machine. (It may take a bit of google searching to figure out how to do that though).

Diggler

That may work, but I would guess that there's a centralized server that is managing each client. If it's anything like the Symantec client we have installed here, there are no options at all locally except for executing a scan with associated parameters. Although, you could uninstall the client with your admin account....

There seem to be a few options for adding tabs to IE6. I haven't tried any of them, so you'll have to be the guinea pig.

• MSN Toolbar - supposedly adds tabs to IE6. Who knows if you can still download a version that works with IE6.
• Windows Live Toolbar - I guess this is newer than MSN Toolbar.
• Foxie - adds a bunch of stuff to IE6. I don't believe it's supported any longer. And saw reports that it crashes IE a lot too. The main site appears to be down, but several "download" sites still carry it.

You guys are the types a guy like me dreads in the workplace
I mean that with good intentions and some humor

I lock down systems against unauthorized use, but someone with a a bit of knowledge and the ability to search and learn can sometimes bypass what I do to prevent unauthorized use. I secretly call these people the Borg....they adapt. Thankfully it doesn't happen very often, and when it does I can pinpoint who did it. They are charged for repairs (my fee for getting the system back to the way it was) and sometimes lose their jobs.

I really don't care what is done in your workplace. I just want to state that things are usually done (or not done) for a reason. Bypassing any security that may have been put on the computers could possibly come back to haunt you. I worked at a place where a couple times per year computer inventory was taken, meaning the computers were scanned for installed software. If anything not company approved or installed was found the employee was in alot of trouble. Loss of employment was not out of the question.

after reading what dboy posted, his IT dept seems very unreasonable. Seriously, who the hell schedules a virus scan in the middle of the work day? That's what 11pm to 5am is for.

Have you tried Safari?
http://www.apple.com/safari/download/

Well oh my, safari works fine (for now). Didn't even think to try that.

LogMeIn also works, but slowly. The internet connection here is about a quarter of the speed I get at home (and I don't even have FiOS)

More horror stories of our IT dept.

A few years ago, they moved everyone over to matching desktops or laptops. Just one config of each to make IT's job easier. I completely understand that, makes sense. However, HAVE SOME SPARE PARTS ON HAND!!! To reduce the money on the books as "inventory" they keep absolutely no parts here at all - and this is a campus of around 1500 people! A guy near me had his old 17" CRT die. Took 4 days to get a replacement. And obviously, he has no computer for that time. No email, anything. To be able to work at all he would each day borrow the monitor of someone who wasn't here. Ridiculous!

Probably the worst offense of all - there is NO backup of people's computers. I personally copy my documents to a network drive every few days, but for most people they have no backup at all and don't even realize it. Anyone coming from another company would assume there's backup scheme in place here, but they'd be wrong. 2 of the buildings here are the company's primary R&D facility. A dead HD could lose data that would cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to recreate.

You don't even have network storage? A common drive that is backed up and multiple people could use?

There are network drives, but most people only use them to store powerpoints for meetings.

There is tons of network drives in fact - personal spaces, group spaces, etc, but no one uses them and there's no automated backup. Do you really expect average people to back up anything?

No, definitely not. But it seems like that space would be ideal for putting important documents on. =)

Weird thing on safari. It's set to use proxy server the same as IE and FF are (auto proxy script) but it doesn't let me access secure sites. IE and FF do fine, without needing another proxy password (since it's the same proxy server for http and https), but safari prompts for my name/pass again and then times out.

And that's exactly what I do. Manually, whenever I think of it.

They did this for a long time at my company (~2PM Tuesday) until users revolted.

They still do mine at noon on thursdays. I just kill the process....

Another browser worth trying: Seamonkey

It's basically the old Mozilla software suite. Firefox separated the browser, email client, etc. and then Seamonkey put them all back together. However, you also have the option to install just the browser portion of seamonkey.

If you like Firefox, then Seamonkey might be the best alternative for you. I think it also accepts most Firefox addons.

I see both sides of the coin. On one side the end user does not want the scan to run during the workday, and that's justified. Scans should be run on a regular basis and 11PM to 5AM is certainly reasonable. Now, on the other side the computer has to be on in order for the operation to start. Do all users leave their computers on at night?

Here they do!

Or have them set to sleep overnight and use an AV that can wake from sleep to scan.

Is it even necessary to do virus scans nowadays with real time protection? Assuming you can enforce the AV real time protection software to always be on.

I've had a dozen calls over the last couple of weeks pertaining to the new viruses/trojans that are spreading around. Real time protection didn't detect them. The systems were running McAffe, Norton or AVG. During a full scan they were detected, except for McAffe which was disabled by one of the trojans.

In that case, doesn't it just mean that the files hasn't been executed yet, and therefore hasn't infected the system? Sure the infected files will live on the system for who knows how long, but if they never get run, does it really pose a problem?

If the virus/trojan is already running before updated virus definitions were available, the moment the virus definition that can identify the new virus/trojan is downloaded, a smart AV software would check all running processes and kill anything bad it finds, but by that time, your system's already infected/compromised.

Got sick of Crazy Browser hanging, so found a new option: SeaMonkey. It's an older mozilla offshoot, so it's roughly like FF 1. Seems WAY more stable than CM was.

How did you find that?

heh

oops, missed your original post. Wasted a week of my life using crappy crazy browser

You can write a batch if they have WOL to turn them on at night.

Ah, but that requires competence in the IT dept, which we are sorely lacking.

new option - Flock (flock.com)

It's FF3 w/ new theming, very heavy on the myspace/flickr/twitter/etc links. Don't use any of those, but it's still way better than seamonkey (which is only ff1 basically).

Main gripe - I have to have a bookmark toolbar. The only way to have it in flock is to also have the flock toolbar on, which is a bunch of little buttons at the left side to open sidebars and stuff. Oh well.

Looks like all FF extensions work w/ it - greasemonkey installed just fine.

According to the Gecko developer's site, Seamonkey 1.1 uses the same version of Gecko (1.8.1) as Firefox 2, and Seamonkey 2.0 uses the same version as Firefox 3.5 (Gecko 1.9.1). So at least the HTML rendering in Seamonkey is on-par with Firefox, even if the user interface looks more spartan.

I'm not as concerned w/ the rendering as the interface - stuff like awesomebar, how tabs work, etc. That's what I meant by ff1 vs ff3

Can you kill the "Symantec Endpoint Protection" process and see if you run FireFox Portable from the USB drive?

not a chance. That's the one thing they've got locked down like fort knox.

It's apparently causing problems all over the place. Since our desktops onl have 512 ram, lots of people's computers are now going into 10 minute long hard drive grinding sessions where you can do nothing on the machine at all. Just waiting for it to happen to someone high enough up the ladder that IT will actually do something about it.