One thing that is experienced by almost everyone is security settings on computers that we don’t own/control/manage that prevent us from doing the things that we want to do. One example of this was addressed by the recent release of a tool from SweetHacks. However, there are still a few other limitations that need to be addressed.

It is important to keep in mind that the reason many of these security settings are in place is so that users do not introduce viruses or other problems into the network. Most of the computers that have these restrictive security settings are managed by people who have a relatively large number of computers to manage compared to the number of people on staff to keep them all running properly.

These network administrators have to take measures to keep the computers running as smoothly as possible and one way to do this is to restrict what users can and cannot do on the machines they access. This is not to say that they are only worried about the users intentionally screwing up a machine, but there is also the threat of malicious software that might be inadvertently let in to the network that has to be protected against.

One of the limitations that I have come across on numerous occasions in several different settings is when the network administrators are worried I might change the time on the clock. Normally, the time on these computers is fairly accurate and does not need to be adjusted, but by locking this feature out, they also make the in-built calendar inaccessible.

What this means is that I cannot double-click on the clock to see what day of the week a given day falls on or things of that nature. If you have also encountered this, there are several ways to overcome this. The easiest thing to do is reference a different calendar. There are many different programs that offer calendars including many email programs. However, the one that I find to be very useful and quite easy to reference is the calendar from Time and Date.

Another cool thing about this website is that their homepage offers many different tools that can be useful and/or fun to play with.

If there are other security settings that limit you from doing things you would like to be able to do on computers that you use, let me know and I will try to address them in a future post.