Preventing unwanted virus and malware attacks

[persius]

Hello
I'm posting to ask for advice about the following issue.
I do maintenance work on a couples PC (Win 8.1). They are seniors with basic computer knowledge but they have a knack of causing so many problems to infect their machine that anybody would say "don't call me again to fix this".
Just recently a virus attacked their computer (they have an active anti virus program running) and what happened was that once the PC is booted, a window appears that wants a password entered before you can access the interface. Sadly, due to the virus there was no password to be used so now the machine needed to be reformatted. For anybody who has reformatted a Win 8 machine you know how time consuming that is.

I would like to ask if there are any safeguards that can be used to prevent them from installing anything on the machine if even by accident (clicking on links, pressing various buttons/options etc)? They tend to be careless when it comes to surfing the web so this is where the issues originate.
If activating admin permissions is the way to go, can I deactivate the option where the PC always asks for permission before performing functions such as deleting or moving files etc? I just want to make it as simple for them to use as possible without placing too many restrictions.

I want to set the machine up in a way that allows them to work but not cause any more problems.
Any suggestions will be appreciated.


Thank you.

 

[samuria]

First thing is to stop reinstalling once you have a ckean working pc create and image that will let you reimage the pc back to a clean state in 30 mins with most you can run it monthly so you have an uptodate image and several backups. We used to shrink c and create another parition for the images with some products like Acronis it will create and hide the parition so it cant be tampered with it also gives an option to press a key on boot and reimage the pc so you can walk someone through it with being on site.

[video]http://www.youtube.com/embed/1CUKPVr-4tE?autoplay=1&rel=0[/video]
The best option is to use Deep Freeze with this you can get infected delete windows file screw up big style reboot and its all back working again its bomb proof it does cost but there are free ones that do the same type of job from here Deep Freeze Alternatives and Similar Software - AlternativeTo.net
some more here System Restore On Reboot - Deep Freeze Your Windows Installation With Free Tools

 

[persius]

HiThanks for replying. I'll go with your suggestion and see how that works out.