Learn to program with me!

               Okay, so first things first. Sorry for the delay on this post. It has been a very long and impacting week. In short, life got in the way for a little while. As we all know, that happens. Sometimes you need to take a break, possibly to get away for a bit, or maybe because you have things you need to deal with. As long as you don’t let life sidetrack you from your goals, then all is well. As long as you come back to it, never let it go, then you will succeed.

                There is one legitimate reason above all that this post is delayed in posting, and it pertains to a recent problem with my dearest laptop. I am running Windows 7 Home Premium Edition, and I have somehow stripped myself of all Administrator rights. Now, let me take a second and really break that down for you and what that means. Without being an Administrator, I cannot install programs or program updates, nor can I efficiently run antivirus programs on my system. While I can run a scan on my computer, it will not access certain files due to lack of privileges.

                This has been an adventure to say the least. To be honest, it’s sort of humorous. I figured, what’s the worst I’m going to have to deal with? Viruses? I’ve never had anyone actually try to hack my system before (then again, I stray from disreputable sites and areas online), and the worst problems I’ve ever had I just had to do a system restart to solve. But this is different, because since I am now going into IT, I wanted to get into the inner workings of this whole problem, and find a legitimate solution. 

                Google is possibly the most incredible resource for any and everything you need to find online. We all know what Google is, and most of us use it on a daily basis. Finding a phone number or address is pretty standard, but there is an art to searching for information online.  For 99.9% of the problems you encounter on any given computer, someone else has already solved it, and posted it online easily found by a simple keyword search. Yet there are those times, such as my case now, where it feels like I’m more or less shaking a Magic 8-Ball, hoping for the right answer to show.

              Regardless, after countless hours searching (it was about 2) I started turning up some solid information.  The first suggestion seemed like the most legitimate and straightforward, so that was obviously the one I chose.  In short, I had to open the command line interface running elevated privileges (right click the icon and choose “Run as Administrator”).  Once the window appeared, you simply type this one little ole line and poof! You’re hidden HomeGroupUser$ account will be revealed.

                Okay, so that didn’t go as planned. No worries, back online we go and see what other options there are. I wasn’t actually able to find much, but one person did suggest I try to use safe mode and see if the profile would appear that way. Yet again…it was to no avail.  Do you ever feel like you’re just getting told….no? Like someone, or something, in this case my computer, is saying “No, ain’t gonna happen. Not today, not any day buddy”, followed by a sick little cackle?

                Well, I have completely backed up any and everything on my computer that is of any importance. Hopefully it won’t come down to a complete system restore, but right now, I’m not so sure. In all fairness, it could be much worse. At least I didn’t drop the laptop. At least I learned a valuable lesson: to never mess with the admin rights. The HomeGroupUser$ profile is hidden by default, to avoid the user inadvertently ruining the OS in the computer with a single click of the mouse.  However, it feels like this is more of a detriment to someone in my position, with the good sense and growing knowledge to be able to use that software appropriately. 

               I have learned quite a bit about Windows 7 in the past week, and maybe through a little more searching I will be able to find the answer to this problem as well. If nothing else, I have upheld my mantra: The best way to learn how something works is to break it, and have to put it back together. That doesn’t work for all situations, but it seems to fit this pretty well. Should I have any updates, I will definitely post them, but otherwise, I assume we are to reset to factory defaults and start fresh. Wish me luck.