My GF and downloading software.

[Troll]

Buy her a laptop of her own you cheap b*st*rd!
She's spawned your love child AND puts up with you for gods sake!

I adopted this approach with the wife - but now all I get is endless requests to "fix" her broken laptop

[SallyAnne]

I adopted this approach with the wife - but now all I get is endless requests to "fix" her broken laptop

But surely that gets you out of all the other house hold chores while you're doing it? Its a win win situation surely!

[lukemg]

Exactly, setup dog-basic user account, tell her it's to stop virus installs etc. If she gets any problems you can check the software she is looking to install.
Best of all though is to get her a laptop (they are cheap and you never know what to buy her for xmas etc) Put a clean build on and be ready to scrub it and reinstall as soon as it plays up/runs like a dog. She will soon get sick of having all her data scrubbed (bung her a usb key to store it on)
Easy.

[PRC1964]

What about a virtual machine?

Or a virtual girlfriend? Ask AtW for details.

[Churchill]

My favourite error message of all time... the oldies are always the best.

Memory allocation error. Cannot allocate memory for error message.

[Troll]

But surely that gets you out of all the other house hold chores while you're doing it? Its a win win situation surely!

I'd rather not add to the never ending list of chores that greet me on a Saturday morning...DIY, Car maintenance etc. and now computer support

[lilelvis2000]

cannot you not setup a restricted account on XP? This account would not have the ability to install software. Plus there are all sorts of policies you can set on her account - if you can manage trolling through all of them, its quite mind numbing.

I also have spyware blaster and spybot search & destroy to help prevent and remove any nasties.

Her own laptop is fine, until she downloads a worm which infects all your machines on the network.

[Buffoon]

I've just remembered one thing that put my ex off for a while: a Page3 wallpaper. Only worked for a bit though. She learnt how to make her apps or whatever I was previously running full screen to cover it up.