I’ve fixed a few broken Windows boxes in my time, some family & friends turn to me as last resort or first port of call. I’m no Computer Science engineer – I went to Art College! I do social media & Online Community Management for a living! I don’t have any Microsoft certification. I do like a challenge though & know enough to be dangerous Just wanted to get that disclosure out of the way first.

So an old colleague asked me to take a look at his teenage daughter’s laptop. Something about it not going online… I powered it on & saw two user accounts – ‘Guest’ & let’s call it ‘User’… I asked for ‘User’ password thinking it would be admin, tried to log in but got: “Windows could not connect to the System Event Notification Service” – so I had to log in as ‘Guest’. Turns out that ‘Guest’ had admin type account status!

Much more on that in a bit… Continue reading →