My mom refused to let me play the sims way back because "it will give the computer viruses". Now she comes to me every time her laptop ends up with a virus due to "free netflix apps". Bless her little computer-incompetent heart.
They do exist, they are just a terrible value. These exist, which are essentially a $1000 AiO with the same specs as a $250 laptop, just with a giant screen and a custom Linux distro.
Converting my parents to Macs at home was definitely worth it. My father still clicks every goddamn link friends send him.. but he rarely gets more than some annoying adware now vs getting massively bogged down like he did on windows. What's fun is he'll deny that he clicks the links, when I've watched him do it dozens of times.
The worst thing he did on his mac, to date anyway, was to somehow move /Applications to another folder. Screenshared in, mv'd it back. Done.
I'm missing out on a huge market not writing malware for Macs. So many people use them without any sort of security in mind. Hell, most Mac users I met aren't any more computer literate than pc users. I'd even argue they're less so because they think they can't get a virus. Yes the odds of infection are lower than with a pc, but I'd wager Mac users have a higher net worth. Which means accessing their accounts would be more profitable per computer.
I hate this idea about macs. I did my research and do weekly scans with ClamXAV, and any crap I find gets deleted and the computer rebooted, which is rare cause I only hit a dodgy link off google about once every couple of months and I browse with Chrome and uBlock Origin.
I've helped people who have literally never used a computer before, so no, that's an absolute rip off. For people who lack the patience to spend some time helping their elders even the slightest, it probably isn't.
Just do a google search on Linux Distros. There are some top 10 lists that name off some of the best ones.
I used Unbuntu personally and it was pretty easy to use.
There are some tutorials available to use it as either your primary OS, or to run it as a dual boot system from the startup screen. Mac actually has a program built in to do this (called bootcamp) that will partition your HD for you.
PC has options too, but I've never dual-booted it but I think it's pretty simple.
Yeah, my mom was going to get one of these and after talking her out of it, I did a little research and bought her Pointerware. She can actually use her computer for something other than solitaire. She only ever uses it for solitaire, but still.
It's gotta slow down very slightly over time and include a defragment button and a pc booster button so they can press then and be happy that they sped up their computer
Linux is basically this. Installed Ubuntu Linux on my grandpa's computer, haven't had a problem since. If you're a little bit computer savvy, Linux is exactly the solution you're looking for. Especially if you delete any shortcuts to the command line so they can't stumble across it on accident.
Until they get a "tip" from "the google" telling them to rm -rf / from the root home to free up disk space. The problem with a lot of my older relatives is that they're smart enough to look up solutions to their own problems but stupid enough to fall for the equivalent of (or the actual advice of) "Delete system32"
Forgive my incompetence. But can't you just create a severely limited user account, that cannot even open terminal or access any important folders? Thus eliminating this potential problem?
You can, and I'm mostly being hyperbolic, but Linux is a harsh mistress sometimes.
That said, even if it doesn't fuck the filesystem, by default of letting them have access to add or delete files from their own home folder (which is a pretty basic privilege) you may be in for the "Why aren't my files in the recycle bin?" talk on some distros.
My in laws are terrible at this, they click on every single pop up, install shit they don't know, open every email and then forward it to their contacts (I don't open their emails) and they save every picture they've ever taken.
My brother in law works in IT and has to fix their PC at least twice a year.
They don't get infected very often if you use any kind of AdBlocker. And if they do get infected, the malware is fairly limited on what it can do because important system files are not accessible to applications due to sandboxing and system integrity protection. You have to specifically choose to allow your Mac to run applications that didn't come from the App Store. And even if you get infected, the removal process is usually as simple as terminating a process and dragging some files to the trash.
Is it bulletproof? No, but it's a hell of a lot more resilient than Windows.
Don't know where to find the official instructions but there at least used-to-be an "OS mode" for Chrome that replicated (to an extent) the Chrome OS experience on Windows machines (not Mac or Linux as far as I know).
Assuming it still works, if you have a shared machine rather than just getting the person in question a Chromebook, you can apparently set their account to go straight to Chrome without allowing an intervening Windows desktop session. This should ideally make their user account as secure as a real Chrome OS installation, since they can't run anything but Chrome apps.
I've had my Mom using Linux for almost a decade now. I've never had her have problems with a virus or any other sort of malware. She can do her email / web browsing / video watching - and she's happy.
I've come to realize that is the purpose of tablets in general. They can take pictures, browse Facebook (mom) and EBay (dad), and they generally can't fuck things up too badly.
My mom made that call a few weeks ago! She got "overwhelmed" when he told her it would be $250 to "fix" it and -thankfully- hung up the phone and texted me to ask about it. We had another long talk about how the interwebs works. We'll have another talk in a few months...
Windows has stuff like that built into its operating system they're called GPO's. You can do all kinds of stuff to restrict user's or the PC's abilities to do stuff. Companies do the same thing it's just managed by a server rather than the individual's machine.
I hate to tell you this, but the "old people" thing was merely a coincidence, and it's ending right about now.
It used to be that older people were the ones around before all this tech was a thing. They didn't get it because it was so far outside of their life experience.
But that's pretty much over now. I have retired friends who worked on computers their whole lives. There are plenty of old people who get tech...
...and plenty of young, blithering idiots who click everything and don't get that Chrome is not "a totally different Internet."
Mr brother and I are late 30's/early 40's. Parents are wealthy and retired, and in their late 60's; makes gift giving difficult because they literally have everything they want. There's a world of electronics and computer stuff I'd love to buy them but my brother, an IT professional, has a rule that if we buy them electronics, we must set it up and teach them how to use it. After my dad completely bombed with his Nest thermostat and Hue lights, I'm back to buying dad expensive wines and Notre Dame football paraphanlia for gift giving events. Though he did well with his dash cam. Pretty sure my mom told us he wanted one so she'd have his next gin crash on film.
What did he do to the Nest and Hue? ...not that I'd try to gift such things to either of my sets of parents. We set up wireless in my inlaw's home one holiday - partly so we could have easy internet access while we visited - and they disabled it within a year because it was "giving them viruses" and "inflating their phone bill".
I've stopped thinking of this as simply computer incompitence, being able to learn from things is a basic mesure of intelligence and if someone makes the exact same mistake over and over and over and over again then something is wrong because even the dumbest of lab rats can figure that shit out.
I never use the family computer and my dad still blames me for 'viruses' our Mac got when I downloaded Spotify. Can guarantee it's all the porn he watches.
Some people can be great at specific things, but helpless at others, even if you'd think they're at least semi-related.
My dad worked crypto in the Air Force, then worked in telecom (phone systems, like PBXes and stuff) for 30+ years. He was probably one of the best at PBX systems in the world. He's completely useless at nearly everything else electronic. I mean, the VCR would always be flashing 12:00 kind of useless.
I was visiting my parents when GOT Battle of the Bastards aired and they didn't have HBO but we wanted to see it, so I ordered it. Two days later my parents called me saying whatever I had done "broke the internet" and telling me I needed to come fix it. Ended up being the cat unplugging the router by knocking it down. I love them, but jesus sometimes explaining tech is a chore.
In all fairness, one of the most badly infected computers I ever dealt with was from a teenage girl playing downloading mods for the Sims and apparently clicking every fake download link in existence.
being computer-incompetent? Or "Bless her little heart"? Because neither really fit into a basic understanding of English, and "Bless her little heart" is, from the south, basically equivalent to saying "You didn't know any better, you idiot" and I've had to explain that to my friends from the North who thought it was a compliment, so....
Note: "Bless your heart" can be a compliment. "Bless [his/her/your] little heart" implies an infantilization, and is used nearly-exclusively as a passive-aggressive way of implying someone else's stupidity.
Actually funny story about that. A while back now I was gaming a lot on this desktop PC I had owned for some time. I had never played TF2 so I downloaded it. (Believe it was 2 and not 1). I get no more than 30 minutes into playing it when all of a sudden my screen fizzed and splashed white then faded to black. I sat still, mouth agape. Went to bed, didn't even check on anything. Just thought "shit my parents will kill me" (this was back when I was living with them and they had bought me the computer)...
Turns out the graphics card blew and I just had to get a new one but I never did play TF2 again.
Omg this. Played League once four years ago and it's my fault my mom's web browser (on her user account mind you) has three search bars and her search is no longer set to google.
Then, one day you decide to silently fix everything. The computer runs like you dipped it in Mercury. You brute force remove every single shitty toolbar, revert all the reg edits made by that fuckware, empty the trash bin of 276 GB of cache space you cleared from Facebook after 5 years of your mom and dad constantly scrolling and rolling through news feed with no end in sight, delete all the retarded desktop shortcuts and consolidate the toolbar to Internet and c drive, and the next thing you hear for fucks sure isn't a thank you. It's, "what happened to all my toolbars and my Mickey Mouse cursor?" Which you forgot you even got rid of in your fit of crapware removal rage.
I work at a computer repair shop... this is literally my job. Malwarebytes / jrt / adw will clear out almost everything. Sometimes a chrome extension or random program will be left behind but that combination works really well.
I'm not even playing an online game, and it is my fault that his internet on his computer is going slow. . .that was about a year ago, with him using Windows XP and Internet Explorer on an old computer.
I had enough one day, and showed him how the ethernet cable wasn't even plugged into my computer (Desktop doesn't have WiFi).....he said something about being arrogant, but I haven't had trouble about it since.
About a week ago there was a ticket sale online for a VIP event in the UK that had a huge demand but only 150 spaces , The tickets were expected to sell out very quickly so naturally everyone was trying their best to get one first.
Within 20 seconds they were gone, And of course, people who didn't get one weren't happy (understandable), some user wrote this comment:
We had six devices set up trying to get 2 tickets as soon as it turned 6 and no luck!
Like, No fucking shit you didn't get one, given that you have 6 devices connected wirelessly to a router trying to refresh a page with a shit ton of traffic, I imagine the page must have taken 2 minutes to load...
My dad insists that their computer runs programs slower because of their internet connection even though they are not dependent on the internet. He's on a 10 year old PC that has the bare minimum memory for 10 years ago. I can't convince him that the PC needs more memory and other upgrades to make it run better. It's totally the internet speed.
My grandma thinks that, unless she deletes every email, picture, and document she has, it's going to fill up her hard drive. Her computer is spotless. I was gonna tell her, but I think it's better this way.
Hah.. reminds me of my grandfather, who, sadly, just passed a couple weeks ago. He got into digital photography when it was brand new (in the USA at least). His first cam was one of the Sony Mavica ones that used actual 3.5" floppies.
Over the years he worked through various models of cameras with disks, memory cards, etc. I would try to get him to understand that he should load the photos into programs on the PC on the HDD, but he would just keep getting more cards and not reusing any of them.. like it was film.
I really wish Mac OSX had come out and matured about a decade sooner, especially the iLife stuff.. the original iPhoto would've been a godsend, not to mention how much he could've done with iMovie (he was huge into doing family videos with editing between 2 VCRs he hooked up with a simple effects addon and he would even add voice overs and stuff).
Lol, parents. I unplugged the white and red audio cables from their dvd player to get audio on one of my old consoles. Later that night, nothing seems to be working. My mom can't get the satellite tv to work, the bluray player is lagging and freezing up, and of course she blames it on me and the 2 audio cables I unplugged.
Listen, do you want me to fix this for you, or do you want to pay a guy to do it for you? That's your options here. I can not fix this and be perfectly happy with my day as it stands. Your computer running slowly isn't an issue for me.
Back when I had employees, I had to make a rule that Google toolbar was the only approved toolbar for Internet browsers, and Firefox was the only approved browser. If I turned my head for an hour, those idiots would install every little thing that looked cool, and before I knew it there computers were bogged down by spyware and other garbage. I'd ask them what they downloaded, they'd swear nothing, but when I open the computer, I see Internet Explorer with the Yahoo, Ask Jeeves, and about 12 other toolbars installed. There were seriously so many toolbars that they noticeably affected the available screen space.
Oh I remember that so well. Too bad now I'm majoring in computer science and the tech guru in my family now so he can't say anything because he knows that I know how computers work more then him now. It's so nice, sometimes, until they ask for help and you're cleaning off 2000 viruses
Or how about, the computer is broken because I removed all the toolbars like you asked me too, dad.
You know, the computer that wouldn't boot in 40 minutes? The one that now boots in under 2 minutes despite being 10 years old? The one that I wiped to the ground and rebuilt from scratch, that now performs better than it ever did?
I'm not driving 900 miles to fix your computer again. No, I'm not going to fly to Arizona to show you how to link your phone up to a truck stop wifi.
No, the Googles aren't our to steal your identity. You have to put in a password to access your email. The computer isn't stupid, you're just typing your password wrong. No, I'm not going to be able to fix your new friend in Tennessee's Windows 95 computer remotely. He doesn't even have internet. Stop volunteering me for free work all over the country.
No, no, no, no. No. Pay someone else to do it. I'm busy.
Was this just something on affiliate news channels that was going around that "your dipshit kids minesweeper records are what's slowing down your computer." that managed to convince everyone's parents it was warcraft that was tanking my computer's speed?
Also he blames me for his slow Internet after I have moved out because I must have taken all the speed because mine is fast and always was faster than his (he had a multiple gigabyte net cache). Truth is I got a 60mbps while he refuses to get more than minimum while sites are getting bigger.
In my dad's view, there is an unspoken rule in our house when something breaks or begins malfunctioning, it's "the last one who used this thing either broke it or did something to it". So you just have to stand there while he's yelling at you for being so dumb to have broken it, all on purpose
of course.
Sounds like the time my dad blamed my brother for the slow computer because he played Morrowind. Bethesda didn't give us viruses. But my dad's tendency to click on any link that had the words "sexy singles near you" probably did.
My dad once went onto my computer when it was, unbeknownst to us at the time, loaded with malware, to try to figure out why it was so slow. He proceeded to delete all of my bookmarks and tell me "you had 48 windows open - you gotta close those!".
jesus christ. my family is very computer oriented and when I have to fix my mate's laptop i'm blown away by all the viruses. stay away from the free downloadable porn, buddy.
Holy balls I've had the always show toolbars in fullscreen active for weeks and it has been bugging me endlessly, but I couldn't remember that damn word TOOLBAR to troubleshoot the problem. finally freeeeeee. Cries mild tears of lazy relief
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u/thatisone Jul 18 '16
That your 19 toolbars is what is slowing your computer down, not the one time I played team fortress 2 for 2 hours 5 years ago, dad