A family member is running a newish Compaq laptop with WIN 7 Home Premium 64 bit and basically it's set up still as per the factory. He's the only user.
We were talking on the phone today about his Yahoo mailbox being hacked by spammers. I asked him about the status of his security software and he told me he has NIS 2011 and Windows Defender running. I told him that conventional wisdom is that it is not a good idea to have more than one active security program running at the same time and to try disabling Defender. He actually could not find out any way in Defender or Action Center or Control Panel to do this which I found when I tried.
When I called up Defender it told me that it was disabled (I have NIS running too and I understood that it automatically disabled Defender but I may be wrong on this) so I activated it and I too could not find out how to. But after rebooting it showed up as disabled so maybe I was right and NIS does disable it.
All of which is a lead in to that he called me back later and took me step by step through the Control Panel and a series of non-obvious steps that ended up in msconfig so he could go to Services TAB and disable Defender loading there. It tells you that you have to reboot.
Fine -- so I then thought I'd extend his education and tell him that all he need have done (now that he knows where it is) was to type msconfig in the START search box and that would have taken him to msconfig.exe and to click on that ..
But it didn't find msconfig although it does for me on my WIN 7 HP 32 bit.
So I said type Run in the Search box (I have it on the Start menu but I wasn't going there with him) and when the Run box came up to type msconfig and OK it ..... but it came back and said it could not find the file ....
But mine does that OK ....
The only thing I can think of are that I always change the View settings to show system and protected files and make the other usual changes and also I am running with elevated privileges ....
Is Windows usually set up initially so that normal users cannot access things like Run or Msconfig ?
If so what's the simplest way for a semiskilled user (since he managed to find the way to disable Defender) to change settings to give him access to msconfig more directly?
I'm going into WIN 7 64 soon to check access there but I think I've already changed the settings for accessing system files.
TIA