Need to provide admin privs remotely

pizzafoundry · 29 Feb 2016

I have a user who is elderly and clicks on everything, whereupon he ends up with all manner of crapware, viruses, and so on. Believe me, I've covered this with him multiple times, and now, since I simply cannot continue to drive out there to fix it over and over and over, I have reset him permanently to standard user status on Win7.

Now of course every time something desperately wants to update, he emails me, I get on, take care of it, and move on. He nagged me enough last summer that I finally caved in and gave him the password. Two days later his machine was totally hosed again. This time it's final - no password.

I think it would be ultra cool to be able to get a remote ping of some kind requesting the privs, saying why, and then allowing me to type in the secret password. Has anyone ever heard of this or is it just too idiotic? My alternative is to fire the customer but I really hate to do this.

pf

paul1149 · 01 Mar 2016

I can't help with the request, but would running his browser in a sandbox help? Or setting windows up in some kind of virtual machine or kiosk mode? Or take a regular scheduled Restore Point to return to via remote connection?

Alejandro85 · 06 Mar 2016

Pretty much any remote desktop tool is able to do so. Keep him as standard and when he needs to update or install something he may call you, who will connect remotely and use the admin password to satisfy the UAC prompt. Good thing is that the password is hidden there, circles appear only instead of the actual characters, the length being the only information that he'll learn about it.

Teamviewer in this regard is a commonly used program and will suffice for your needs. It fits the non-savvy user well.