Girls who think they know everything about computers PART III: Girlfriends mother

[JoT]

The only way to remedy that, in my opinion, is to housebreak the parents. Thankfully, I installed tons of security crap (a hosts file seemed very effective) on all the computers in the house and warned her firmly not to go to stupid-sounding places. And plus, my parents do know better... only if my sister had so much common sense...

Hosts file for the win. I'll be looking into doing something like that for my smoothwall (if possible) when I get it going. Should stop a ton of crap, and prevent the loss of the file when using odd browsers, reinstalling, formatting, etc.

 

[tenchi86]

Someone like that would just say these contest are people she knows. Plus ones from people you know are often viruses. I would just jack her PC up on like a auto antivirus like AVG like 5 spyware apps some of which will do an automatice scan, an auto defrag. Just go buck wild on that thing.

 

[TalRW]

my turn:

my wife's friend is TOTALLY CONVINCED that she NEEDS win2000...

she has win98 on some old Compaq PC that had 32MB of ram (found some ram in my "junk drawer" and got it up to 128)....

she's SURE that since 2000 > 98 its better and faster.

i had a REALLY hard time not falling off the chair laughing...it was *almost* sad

can you picture a rig with 32 (or even 128) of RAM running win2000... :shakehead:

You can run 2k on 32 megs of RAM. I have my laptop with 32 megs of RAM running it. Check out this article.

http://www.nexle.dk/daniel/win2000-32mb/

 

[Dreamstalker]

I have some family friends who have a 200MHz, 64MB of RAM (4x16 with one bad stick) Sony paperweight in the guest room. I don't think I've ever used anything that slow. They also have DSL, and can't figure out why the PC in the guest room is glacial ("But it's DSL, everything should be faster!" Well, I've dealt with low-end dialup that's faster than that heap). Win98, tons of spyware that my software won't touch for whatever reason (OS too old maybe?). I tried to copy my hosts file to theirs, but their box wouldn't even recognize my thumbdrive.

I've offered a few times to sell them my old P4 Dell, asking for only the cost of the RAM and CPU I replaced plus shipping/packing. It's not the greatest, but would be a lot faster than what they have now and be able to actually make DSL worthwhile in there.

Reply: "No, that computer's perfectly fine, it works." Yes it may work but DSL is completely wasted on a dinosaur like that. If you're going to keep a computer in the guest room, I strongly suggest it be one that can be used.

And then there's my mom who's fairly savvy about viruses, spyware and the like except she refuses to believe that AVG is any good because it's free . Also "I don't care what's wrong, I just want to get my email!" (well if you want your email to work I need to figure out what's wrong).

 

[ckj]

I want to take welding... too bad I've got too much other stuff to do.

 

[Robbie]

Those are the kinda people you make lot's of money off of. (maybe then they'll learn)

 

[PCGUY112887]

lol, my dad refused to believe there was such a thing as "spyware" until he saw it mentioned in a magazine, but for some reason he's convinced spyware=virus.

One day my mom randomelly came up to me and asked if I had spyware. I said no and she was like "are you sure it hides on the computer!" and I was like yes mom i'm sure.

Never heard about it again, I think it's because they were just talking about "spyware" on the news and she decided to ask me about it.