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DADDY BOB'S COMPUTER Q & A
November 11,
2007
Q.
More than one person uses my computer and
sometimes files are downloaded without my
permission. How can I prevent something from
being copied to one of those little USB drives?
A.
You can write protect all USB storage
devices by making a modification to the
computer's registry. This will prevent
anything from being written to any USB drive
including a "Flash" drive (sometimes called
a "Thumb" drive) as well as any USB Hard
drive.
This
would probably be the easiest way to prevent
copying anything from your computer to a USB
"Flash" drive. Anything that is already on
the USB device can still be read or
otherwise used, it only blocks writing to
the device.
Modifying
the registry can be tricky, and if not done
correctly, could render the computer
unusable. Therefore, rather than listing the
required steps here I have written a little
applet that will safely allow toggling this
USB write protection on or off. It is in the
Download section of this site or can be
downloaded by clicking
HERE.
Be
advised that once this USB write protect
feature has been activated, it must be
deactivated using the same applet before
anything can be saved to a USB drive.
This write protection is not totally
impenetrable. It could be bypassed by
someone allowed enough time and with
advanced computer knowledge and skills.
However, it will prevent most users
from copying files from the computer to a
USB drive.
Q.
Sometimes an incoming email (in OE) is
marked with a red flag. The help file says a
red flag indicates "the message is flagged."
How does a message get "flagged" and what
does it signify if a message is "flagged?
A.
This red flag is something that you are
doing rather than it coming from an incoming
email. The red flag is set by clicking on
the little flag icon just to the left of the
"To" column when the incoming email is
displayed. It is intended so that you can
flag an email to call it to your attention
to it later. I suspect that you have
unintentionally clicked this icon without
realizing that you have done it. Clicking
the flag icon toggles it on and off.
About the
only thing a sender can set is the priority.
Normally, by default, an email is sent with
"normal" priority. If the email has a high
priority, it will have a
red exclamation mark
(!) to the left of the "To" column.
If set to a low priority it will have a
green down arrow.
To set the priority, when you have created
an email, click Message in the top menu,
then Set priority, then High, Normal or Low.
When the
email protocols were first designed,
everyone that used email was knowledgeable,
honest and there were no spammers or other
devious persons using it. Users were trusted
to only set priorities high if the message
was very important.
However,
in today's world, setting priority on an
email is not practicable as it would
probably be ignored by the person receiving
it or blocked by anti-spam filters. And how
many people do you know that would purposely
indicate that a email they sent was of a low
priority? |
