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After you’re past the inability to get logged in, use “Administrator” to create an account with admin privileges with its own strong password and then disable “Administrator” again. Everybody knows that computers are controlled by accounts named “Administrator” and that’s where they’ll start hacking. A name like “BosS-mAn?” is hard to crack, isn’t too awful to remember and, with a strong password, helps ensure against the creepy-crawlies out there.

Agreeing with the general sense of the thread, yes, user data should be completely separate from OS and other vendor data.

Years ago I formed the habit of putting anything I want to keep on the home server, where I know it will get reliably backed up in a way that I understand and I don’t have to worry about it. Before I had a home server I used a second hard drive for that purpose. Before I had a second hard drive I used a C drive partition for that. Before partitioning I had my own user folder and tree for that. We’re going back nearly 20 years here

I never did understand the “documents and settings” tree. It was a baby step over the wild and wooly days before Win 95. The Vista and Win7 “users” tree is a toddler’s step in the right direction, but it’s still impenetrable, largely undocumented, and contaminated with junk that has nothing to do with personal data. I don’t trust what I don’t understand. I need to trust and understand my own personal data that has nothing whatever to do with OS and other vendors. So I put it where I know where it is, what it is, and how safe it is.

I’m not saying not to make drive images or recovery mechanisms or partitions or whatever. Those things are useful and make disaster recovery (or a clean OS install) much less of a chore. I just don’t want my important stuff buried in an impenetrable terabyte tree of thousands of folders I don’t care about, all mixed up with OS stuff and application program stuff. I want it where I know where it is and how safe it is. If push comes to shove and I have to reinstall the whole world from scratch, the stuff I really care about is happily backed up and ready for whenever I get a working system back.

Unfortunately, Microsoft never did “get” that people think this way. The application vendors aren’t any better. They’d be quick enough to agree that my financial data, my word processing documents, my spreadsheets, etc. are mine and have nothing to do with them, but they still consider my browser bookmarks and settings, my emails and settings, my personal application settings, and the like not “mine” but “theirs.” They still bury that stuff down in that huge, impenetrable, thousand folder, undocumented tree, where it’s hard to find and harder to manage.

Maybe they’ll “get” it some day. It would make their lives, and ours too, much easier.