71–80 of 109 posts
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After, you know, asking.
You mean there could be people who actually want the toolbars?
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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…
In reality I never set up remote access because I haven't needed to. They love the thing and have never had trouble with it now.
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Was anyone harmed? ... I'm joking of course. So they were frustrated for a second and then you showed them how to get the menu bar and everything was ok, right? Why was there a lot of angst, and why was it unsafe?
It is "unsafe" for the would-be helper to help people who aren't asking/paying for help and who don't understand the difference between a easily changed default setting and installed spyware. With such people, you never know when they will simultaneously accuse you of "breaking" their computer and remove your access to said computer so that whatever you've done that they believe "breaks" the computer indeed becomes "…
On the other hand it could be a benefit to be removed from the duty of maintaing their computer, so maybe pissing them off is a (selfish) win.
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> (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.'
"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 don't have a problem with unlimited liability to do work for my parents... Anyway, I installed Linux on my mother's system over Win XP years back and it couldn't have gone better. She has been doing great with Ubuntu for 2 years now. The spyware, failed updates and odd networking failures I was summoned to her house to fix frequently went away entirely, so thankfully it was the opposite of your warning. I guess the…
Since then, I've had two support calls from him: 1) "Is it safe to enter my password when it's installing updates?" 2) "I'm at my friend's house... how do I add a new wireless network?"
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You mean there could be people who actually want the toolbars?
Lots of people apparently liked the Google Toolbar for Firefox (even though it was installed along with other software, hijacked your bookmarks, and generally behaved pretty much like every other malware toolbar out there). More to the point, since it hijacked your bookmarks, if you uninstalled the toolbar all your bookmarks disappeared.
"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 tried doing that a couple of times and they end up looking for the blue "e". Somehow that's their symbol for "the internet". So what I did next was not uninstall but hide the icon and leave the chrome & FF visible. Now my dad uses Firefox and he calls it "the mozilla" hehe. And my mom somehow figured out a way to find IE, I guess she couldn't live without it. That was my case at least.
I just changed the icon of chrome to the blue "e". Problem solved.
Thank god my mom uses a Mac.