I have an ex-company desktop that I am setting up for my friend's 98 year old mother, whose existing one was used by Noah. She has a mind like a razor but her eyesight and her memory for PC related things isn't great and I want to make it as simple as possible.
It's a Dell Optiplex with XP Professional. I have removed the "domain" business by switching to "workgroup" and there is now one user account with administrator privileges and Guest Account is "off".
I have removed the password by changing it to an empty field, so she doesn't need one but the password dialogue still appears - it is only necessary to hit enter to continue.
Q1. How can I get rid of the password dialogue?
The second problem is that I can't get the DVD RW drive to see a disc. I might have disabled it in some way - initially I thought I needed to crack the administrator password so I made an bootable disc with Ophcrack LiveCD on it. The machine ignored this and boot from the HDD. I went into BIOS and the first boot option as I suspected was the HDD so I changed it to the DVD RW drive. It still booted from the HDD.
Device manager says it is working properly. The BIOS setup says is there there and enabled. My friend (whose work PC it was) says it worked before I got hold of it.
Q2. What might I have done to stop this drive working properly? I can understand why a system admin would try to prevent a networked PC from being booted from a disc, is it disabled in some other way? Not that it will see files on any disc now - the drive shows in MyComputer but no disc or files - it doesn't even flash the activity light, though it does when you insert a disc.
It seems unlikely it's actually bust?
Grateful for any help.
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