Computer Wars

I've been having an ongoing battle with my son recently over the computer. Nope, I'm not talking about LAN gaming or fighting to use the PC, but rather fighting with him over what he has been doing to his PC. Ever since we started him on the PC more than 10 years now, he has taken to it like a duck to water. However he has some odd quirks of his that I just cannot get him to change eg. insisting on deleting a game from his hard drive after he has finished playing it, including saved games and user info, sometimes from the Windows folder. We put in TweakUI to hide his recycle bin, hoping to retrieve any important files he might have deleted. We also have a disc image on hand (he is using Windows ME) to restore his C drive should it get mucked up totally.

For the last few weeks however, I have been getting a strange problem with his PC — his video drivers just kept on disappearing leaving him with 16 colours. True, the problem was easily sorted out by reinstalling the drivers but we just couldn't figure out why they were disappearing. After about 10 reinstallations, I just found out 2 days back that unbeknownst to me, he was accessing the Add/Remove Control Panel and purposely uninstalling his video drivers. Don't ask me why he did it — he's not telling! I used TweakUI to hide the Video Driver from the Add/Remove Prog list but to my horror, I found out yesterday that he has been using TweakUI to untweak the things I have been doing! Thankfully I figured out how to hide the TweakUI Control Panel Icon (ironically using TweakUI) and I do hope that's the end of the problem for now. Hubby was laughing his head off at my consternation and calling him a rascal, but I think he was pretty proud of his devious son!