Also, delete all those toolbars.
After, you know, asking.
You mean there could be people who actually want the toolbars?
For Thanksgiving, give your parents a treat: upgrade their browser
51–60 of 109 posts
Re: For Thanksgiving, give your parents a treat: upgrade their browser
#52It's also a great lesson in humility. Every developer should support some noobs from time to time. It's surprising how difficult some computer tasks really are.
Re: For Thanksgiving, give your parents a treat: upgrade their browser
#53"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.
You must all really have very inflexible parents. My parents are very non-technical (when it comes consumer electronics – my dad can engineer a kick-ass water supply infrastructure for you if you need it) and generally clueless about many things having to do with computers but they never had a problem with me switching browsers for them (from IE to Firefox to Safari to Chrome; they are currently using both Safari and Chrome depending on which computer they use).
Maybe it has something to do with the features they use? What my parents need is Google as a start page, the back and forward buttons and sometimes the address bar. All browsers I installed for them had those features in the same places and looking (approximately) the same.
What I want to say is this: all parents are different and you shouldn’t be discouraged by the experience of some not to update or change browsers. Before you do so I would recommend watching your parents how they use their old browser. If there is some feature they use that is in a different place or has a different name or works in a different way or isn’t there at all you have an uphill battle ahead of you and maybe you don’t want to change anything. If not you are fine.
Re: For Thanksgiving, give your parents a treat: upgrade their browser
#54I hope nobody minds but I'd like to share what happened to me recently: My father called me a few months ago to ask if I could go on our bank's online banking site and tell him if I noticed anything unusual. At the time, HSBC's online banking had the following flow: Enter your user ID as the first step, enter your DOB as the second, and finally enter three specified digits from your 6-figure security PIN. It all seem…
What's even more terrifying is that for every person savvy enough to at least know when something's not right (new PIN box), there's several more that wouldn't give it a second thought.
Although having a more modern browser will help, this is the kind of stuff that only better education can truly protect against.
Re: For Thanksgiving, give your parents a treat: upgrade their browser
#55Earlier quoted context omitted.
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,…
On the other side of the coin, most of these anecdotes are instances of doing favors for friends/relatives. If you tried to charge them, a number of them would be critical of your decision to not 'do them a favor.'
Re: For Thanksgiving, give your parents a treat: upgrade their browser
#56"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.
The trick is to do it in such a way that they don't notice, and without telling them you did anything at all.
Re: For Thanksgiving, give your parents a treat: upgrade their browser
#57I hope nobody minds but I'd like to share what happened to me recently: My father called me a few months ago to ask if I could go on our bank's online banking site and tell him if I noticed anything unusual. At the time, HSBC's online banking had the following flow: Enter your user ID as the first step, enter your DOB as the second, and finally enter three specified digits from your 6-figure security PIN. It all seem…
Very likely to be zeus or another related banking trojan, that's a trick that i know it can pull. You may want to watch as changing browser may not get rid of the underlying problem, and anti-virus is apparently somewhat spotty st detecting and removing this class of threat.
Re: For Thanksgiving, give your parents a treat: upgrade their browser
#58Re: For Thanksgiving, give your parents a treat: upgrade their browser
#59"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 stalled the laptop purchasing decision for my mom and grandmother and ended up letting other family members get my grandmother a laptop (Windows), and I let my mom get talked into buying a Mac by some friends and family members and abdicated all tech support responsibility by arguing that I only knew how to use Windows. It worked; all blame is shifted away from me (as it should be) to the electric contraptions and…
I went the opposite way and dumped windows and started telling people I had no idea how it worked anymore (Vista was a blessing, moving everything around into new places :P) which reduced my tech support to pretty much nothing.
Now whenever a novice asks for advice on what computer they should buy, I point them towards a Mac. For the most part, people just dont have problems; but when they do I tell them to go in to the genius bar so I _still_ dont have to do tech support. I offer advice, Apple handles support. Wins all round from my perspective!
Re: For Thanksgiving, give your parents a treat: upgrade their browser
#60Browser? Why stop there! I just installed Ubuntu 11.10 on my mother's netbook. It runs about 5 times as fast as Windows 7 was going on that machine and provides 100% of the software she wants to use and 0% of what she doesn't (stable OS, choice of the latest Opera/FF/Chrome, photo management... and no malware).