No admin rights on work laptop and haven't tried playing a DVD, but brought a load with me incase I get bored. Does anybody know of any DVD players I could download that wouldn't need admin rights?

Cheers

No admin rights required.
H

I would laugh but I'd already considered buying a cheapo one for my hotel room, but not that desperate!

i just changed my profile from admin to standard user to test my player, and now it wont go back to admin. :bang:

i'll have to ask for help, how embarrassing

btw, my player (divx) works fine now that i'm no longer an admin.

LOL jug

But you installed it as admin, I found over the weekend that I couldn't do much. I might have a DVD decoder from IBM and it will all work fine, but I also think I may be over estimating it. I won't know until I get to the hotel tonight, if so, I still have a TV I suppose.

Daft question but Win Media Player?

Can't you get local admin rights on the laptop for the week? Especially if something minor goes wrong 'in the field'.

I have to have a decent reason, scratch that, I'd have to have a decent reason PLUS the agreement of a medium level manager, which won't happen The sixth form student guy at work got admin rights for something on his work PC and installed everything from firefox to Flash etc. but I am not that clever.

Since I only have the laptop for "work based disseration" work, I'd find it a very difficult thing to work out rights for it.

Win Media hopefully will work but that relies on it having a DVD decoder installed.

i'm currently looking into XP hacks to get admin rights. i'll let you know if i find something that works.

just come down to edinburgh and i can do you an xbox paul

Hellcat said:

Daft question but Win Media Player?

Click to expand...

Only if you have a third party codec installed, which would probably require said admin rights.
H

VLC?

thats the best all round player out there...
install it to a memory stick and bobs your uncle, you can run it straight from there

If you have to install it, admin rights would most likely stop you.

It's fine anyway, WMP plays it so obviously it came from IBM with a codec, had a nice evening reading and watching DVDs. Cheers for the tries guys

On a similar topic, do you guys in the UK have problems like we do with players that 'lock' themselves to a certain region on the 5th play?

We're region 4, but discs from the UK are region 2, which causes us headaches. Most DVD players sold in stores (supermarkets etc!) are not locked to a region (or technically, region '0') but DVD players in laptops always seem to lock themselves and the manufacturers don't seem to want to come to the party (NZ Government decreed that region locking was not a legal requirement).

-Alex

You can get region killers or like me I have two dvd drives, on R1 and the other R2.

Liam

Heh, another victim of the "work computer" syndrome then! Mine was a ballache; couldn't install stuff, lots of media files wouldn't play as I couldn't install codecs, and although DVD's worked the screen saver was locked to come on every 15 mins and require the password to get rid... annoying when watching a film!

I do have the password for the admin account on my work machine (amazing what you can pick up looking over the IT man's shoulder as he types ), and VLC off a memory stick will open most things (but still have the screensaver prob); however, I found a far more cunning way around the problem.

Step 1: Buy a replacement HDD thats twice the size of the standard one (mine was 40Gb standard, so bought an 80).

Step 2: Plug new drive into desktop PC via IDE 2.5"-to-3.5" convertor and partition it into 2 equal partitions.

Step 3: Plug original drive into desktop via USB caddy thingy and copy the whole lot onto the first partition on the new drive.

Step 4: Stick new drive in laptop, run a Windows setup disk and install to the second partition.

Step 5 (clever bit): Once you've done step 4, the machine will boot your personal OS by default. Panic ye not... from your OS, run notepad and re-write the C:\boot.ini file that gives a choice of OS on startup:

[boot loader]
timeout=20
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Professional [work]" /fastdetect
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(2)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Professional [personal]" /fastdetect /NoExecute=OptIn

Now laugh merrily as your hitherto-restricted work machine is now "yo bee-atch"!

... now you can install games, media players, and all those useful little bits of software that the IT muppets won't put on for you. The beauty of replacing the HDD is that, should it all go to pot, you can whip out the drive, stick the original back in and hey presto, IT people won't know any different

Yeah good idea but a little extreme - sadly the laptop is only mine when I need it rather than one specifically for me. Cheers for it though JB.

I did have VLC on my memory stick (froma long time ago) and WMP didn't want to play Mp3s yesterday (!!!) despite being able to do DVDs. I installed VLC from the memory stick and there wasn't a problem in sight, very odd. It worked fine for mp3s, I have deleted all the shortcuts so nobody will know it's there except for me - unless they go looking.