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For Thanksgiving, give your parents a treat: upgrade their browser

arstechnica.com

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Re: For Thanksgiving, give your parents a treat: upgrade their browser

#21

Post by melling »

charleso wrote: post #17

"Well, everything worked fine until you installed that [Chrome | Firefox | Opera] thing on my computer." Doing free tech support for non-technical people is a wonderful thought, but it can also provide a harsh lesson in the dangers of unlimited liability for open-ended, no-fee, no-contract work.

Yeah, I got heat earlier in the year when I had my girlfriend upgrade her 80 year old dad's computer to IE9. Something was different with his favorites. Impossible to troubleshoot over the phone. Hopefully, he's over it by Christmas. :-)

My sister still gives me the "my computer runs slower now" after I had her do IE9.

Personally, I just take the opportunity to work on my sells skills. After all, IE9 is only a Microsoft blessed upgrade.

My mom asked about Chrome because she saw a Google ad. Let's see if I can "sell" her on it. Keep up those ads Google.

Re: For Thanksgiving, give your parents a treat: upgrade their browser

#22

Post by w1ntermute »

My parents are running Linux now, but when they were on Windows, I just changed the Firefox shortcut's icon to be the IE icon. I didn't change anything else (not even the text below the icon from "Mozilla Firefox" to "Internet Explorer"), but my parents of course didn't notice.

Re: For Thanksgiving, give your parents a treat: upgrade their browser

#24

Post by fl3tch »

pasbesoin wrote: post #19
charleso wrote: post #17

"Well, everything worked fine until you installed that [Chrome | Firefox | Opera] thing on my computer." Doing free tech support for non-technical people is a wonderful thought, but it can also provide a harsh lesson in the dangers of unlimited liability for open-ended, no-fee, no-contract work.

I just recently wrapped up (hopefully) some donated work for a relative's business while it was struggling, financially. The relative's business partners were repeatedly dismissive, disrespectful, and ungrateful. The financial bind they'd gotten themselves into made my life more difficult in either having to pony up, myself, for what they needed or spend extra time and effort working around their financial constraint…

> (Most) people value service in and to the extent they pay for it. If it's "free", they can often be endlessly if ignorantly critical.

Maybe people don't want to believe that they wasted their money, so they minimize problems with things that they pay for, while a free product entails no personal investment, financial, social or psychological.

Maybe a low price (including zero) is a signal of a low quality product, which comes with the expectation of something to be criticized. (Their thinking might be) why would you be providing these services to us for free if they didn't suck?

Re: For Thanksgiving, give your parents a treat: upgrade their browser

#25

Post by Kylekramer »

charleso wrote: post #17

"Well, everything worked fine until you installed that [Chrome | Firefox | Opera] thing on my computer." Doing free tech support for non-technical people is a wonderful thought, but it can also provide a harsh lesson in the dangers of unlimited liability for open-ended, no-fee, no-contract work.

Oh god, tell me about it. Once I came to my parents' house to find the family laptop having gained a wonderful feature where every search result would redirect to spyware. Did my best to clean the mess and get everything somewhat reasonable, and then got a call a few weeks later saying my "porn watching" ruined their computer and deleted their bookmarks.

Re: For Thanksgiving, give your parents a treat: upgrade their browser

#26

Post by [deleted] »

w1ntermute wrote: post #22

My parents are running Linux now, but when they were on Windows, I just changed the Firefox shortcut's icon to be the IE icon. I didn't change anything else (not even the text below the icon from "Mozilla Firefox" to "Internet Explorer"), but my parents of course didn't notice.

[deleted]

Re: For Thanksgiving, give your parents a treat: upgrade their browser

#27

Post by andrewflnr »

citricsquid wrote: post #4

The idea is cute, but seems unlikely to happen. If someone's parents are the sort to let their children upgrade their browser, they're also the sort that probably had their computer set up by their children which means it's probably already updated. If they're the sort that are in control of their own computer usage they probably aren't comfortable with their children changing the way their computer works.

Most likely, they had their computer set up by the OEM. And even if their kid set it up at one point, there's no reason to assume it stayed updated.

Re: For Thanksgiving, give your parents a treat: upgrade their browser

#28

Post by highriseo »

charleso wrote: post #17

"Well, everything worked fine until you installed that [Chrome | Firefox | Opera] thing on my computer." Doing free tech support for non-technical people is a wonderful thought, but it can also provide a harsh lesson in the dangers of unlimited liability for open-ended, no-fee, no-contract work.

Remember that this article is advising that you upgrade to the most recent version. That means if your parents are running IE 6, let it update itself. Although I agree with you're point about not contract work, I think that upgrading to a newer version of the same software holds low enough liability (esp when compared with changing to Firefox/Opera/Chrome)

Re: For Thanksgiving, give your parents a treat: upgrade their browser

#30

Post by sjs »

charleso wrote: post #17

"Well, everything worked fine until you installed that [Chrome | Firefox | Opera] thing on my computer." Doing free tech support for non-technical people is a wonderful thought, but it can also provide a harsh lesson in the dangers of unlimited liability for open-ended, no-fee, no-contract work.

Did you read it?

> The Atlantic advises a conservative approach: don't switch to a different browser, just give them the latest version of the browser they're already using. Be on hand for the first time or two they use the browser, just in case they notice the change and have questions.

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