I spent the morning putting CentOS on my parents' desktop.

"Here's Firefox. Here's Open Office. No, you do not get SU."

"What's SU?"

"Exactly. No SU for you."

GAT_00: rfronk: Here's Open Office.

I actually just went back to Microsoft after using Open Office for a few years, because while the Word copy is fine, the Excel copy is badly underpowered.

I did too. But unfortunately MS Office doesn't work on linux so they will have to settle. MS 2010 is actually very good.

rfronk: I spent the morning putting CentOS on my parents' desktop.

"Here's Firefox. Here's Open Office. No, you do not get SU."

"What's SU?"

"Exactly. No SU for you."

Who will make the sandwiches?

FishyFred: Can we apply this to corporations instead?

or schools? I'd like to upgrade from DOS.

While we are at it, there should also be a sneakily run CCleaner on your parent's PC day.

/CSB: last week my coworker ran out of free space on her laptop. I recommended her CCleaner and it ended up freeing almost 4 GB of shiat. I also ran it on my PC and it deleted 800 MB of temp files, which is amazing considering that I don't use my work PC for browsing.

2wolves: How many people fit your user profile? 99% of the U.S. would never know or miss anything from Office.

Everyone that I've spoken to that's used OO or LO miss *something*. 99% of people are about 99% satisfied with it, but of the 100 features you might use there's that 1 little niggling feature that doesn't work right. I can think of one or two people that I had to teach how to work *around* that niggling little thing they didn't like because I was smart enough to figure out how to do so and they weren't, so that sucks. But still, LibreOffice is still a success. I just contend a little with the "99% of people won't notice" claim.

That said, I don't use either one often and haven't in a while. I use Google Docs for the couple things I need a word processor and a spreadsheet for.

smooshie: Lol I wish.

Came home, upgraded my family's Firefox 4 to 8, and was quickly forced to revert the whole damn thing because Google Toolbar didn't work and the regular FF search is not good enough. At least they don't use IE =/

Eh, to be fair, IE 9 is pretty good. Not the best, but with its release, there were officially no more "bad" web browsers. I use Opera for most things, Chrome for other things, and IE 9 for still other things. None are perfect. I used to be big into FF but it became a resource hog one update and I never used it consistently after that.

Toolbars are for people who think having AIDS on your computer is a good thing.

SomethingToDo: rfronk: I spent the morning putting CentOS on my parents' desktop.

"Here's Firefox. Here's Open Office. No, you do not get SU."

"What's SU?"

"Exactly. No SU for you."

Who will make the sandwiches?

My mom. "Please" works just as well as sudo.

/xkcd ftw

brigid_fitch: FishyFred: Can we apply this to corporations instead? I would like to use a browser that actually displays the company portal correctly.

Our parents will happily continue to type URLs into Google search.

Beats my mother-in-law who types them into Facebook's search.

My favorite is when they use the Facebook status update to "search".

Set the computer up and forget it...... Some very basic settings keep the computer fresh and malware clean(for months and months)... Until the fracking grand kid of hers shows up and ,,,, Well yea I was coming back a couple of days later to finish, but as I said, "where did these 5 pieces of spyware come from?" Did a little digging and the deleted Kazza(by the kid afterwards) sure installs a bunch of junk with it... too bad the kid was not smart enough to un-install all the files locations, so evidence ensued.

Yarp, just spent an hour removing all of the ridiculous toolbars, defragging the drives and wiping the virus/malware infestations. What ARE you people doing?

/Burp
//tomorrow... where is my Weatherbug?

Generation_D: lol. The LAST thing on thanksgiving I or my wife want to be doing is messing with the dogged out POS they call a computer. Its my damn day off. Clean out your own broken registry and fake malware updates.

Taking them to dinner this year, best thing we ever did if only for getting out of the mandated hour turns into all day IT horror show in return for turkey.

Is their computer form 1995?

DarthBrooks: FishyFred: Can we apply this to corporations instead? I would like to use a browser that actually displays the company portal correctly.

Our parents will happily continue to type URLs into Google search.

Scouting.org is the official website for the Boy Scouts of America. Every troop in America has to recharter itself each year via this site.

You CANNOT recharter online unless you're logged in with IE6. The site claims that it supports FF 2.0 but their phone support will tell you it doesn't work. You MUST use IE6 or the site won't work.

Jesus God Almighty - - how difficult is it to build a flippin' authenticated webpage that's W3C compliant and not in some baffling, bug-filled quirks mode for a national organization?

Same here. Just finished a project to update all PCs for a major company.
Did we also upgrade them to Windows 7?
No.
Why?
Because some of the in-house applications that are vital to a company that is responsible for the pensions and retirement funds for thousands of families in America only run on IE6.

We're doomed.

Tomorrow is Have Your Child Explain What They Did Day Week?

I had it easy since my retired parents have dial up. Booted it up and fixed firefox
then let Windows Update take over. Started Windows Update at 4:30pm EDT
and as far as I know its still downloading. Told him to let it run all night.
Easiest Thanksgiving computer repair ever for me. 45kbps still sucks.

I don't touch family members computer's with a 10 foot pole.

Great, you have an active and healthy sex life. Awesome. I don't want to see what you've bookmarked or what auto-fills when I use your browser. I also don't want to be the one getting phone calls because the updates I installed changed some trivial thing.

'Fark_Guy_Rob - when I used to have like, a bunch of windows, ya know, open at the same time and then if I went and I closed the main window then it would pop up a thingy and I could save the windows. Then, when I open it again, the windows would all be there. But now it doesn't pop up that thingy. How do I get that back? Settings? I don't see that. Should I open the thingy first? Okay, now it's open. What do I click? Settings? I don't see that. File....I see file.....'

Normally, it's infected with all sorts of crap and hasn't been updated in 12 months or longer. First, it's an hour to scan the POS and clean up the infections...normally 2-3 reboots in for good measure. Then, it's updating the browsers. Then, it's installing all the updates they never installed.

It ends up being a six hour marathon (granted, I'm largely just letting it run) but, in the end, the slightest thing will be different and they hate it.

I have been trying to get my mother to use Opera for years. She uses AOL (IE). Oh, those who are so blind they will not see.....

A person who has a parent who uses FF I agree

smooshie: Lol I wish.

Came home, upgraded my family's Firefox 4 to 8, and was quickly forced to revert the whole damn thing because Google Toolbar didn't work and the regular FF search is not good enough. At least they don't use IE =/

There is a fix for that as we use FF 8 at work with Google toolbar. Ill grab documentation in the morning

Gonz

He's only going to use the machine to surf the web, it's not like the OS matters.

If the OS didn't matter you could have left him on windoze.

brigid_fitch:

If I were ever to confuse my FB status update as my search window, I'd have to change my name and move to a country we don't have an extradition treaty with

4Chanistan ?

/ I'd prefer prison

Gonz: My dad's laptop was running a little slow- as in, it took about a half hour to start up. I forced Windows to update, and that bricked it.

Dad's now a Linux user, and I haven't had an issue since. He's only going to use the machine to surf the web, it's not like the OS matters.

My dad would be pretty pissed if I screwed up his computer and the only fix I could offer was, "I can put a crappy free OS on it."

Gonz: excellent

That word does not describe Ubuntu. Maybe if you're a poor African villager, but even then...

Uhh...no. My mother would notice something like that, and would completely freak out. When she finally started using her new computer, I made sure Firefox was the default browser, but I forgot to explain the differences. She picked it up fairly quickly after I explained myself.

FunkOut: Seriously, most old men are just browsing websites. The free Ubuntu works just fine for that so they can stumble into all the unsafe virus ridden porn sites without frying their computer. They just type stuff into Google and click on it.

If that's all they ever do, and they don't care about the last 15-20 years that they've used Windows, great. Windows has been a fairly predominant OS for over 15 years though, and trying to get old people to use something new without asking them generally gets them pissed off.

I can't imagine my parents putting up with me screwing up running some updates to the point they'd need to learn to deal with a new OS because I couldn't just get things back to normal for them. I guess if they don't own digital cameras of GPS units or anything else that plugs into the system it might not matter, but that seems like a tiny subset of population.