Sometimes you DON'T actually need virus protection

[Victoria J]

Not a client, my mother. I just thought this would amuse anyone working with computers.

I HATE having anything to dowith my mother's computer but got roped into replacing her virus protection on Tuesday. Removed the old program (which was stopping her using the computer rather thanstopping viruses), cleaned off something nasty it hadn't caught, and put on a new program.

Wednesday I get an email at work which says that windows has put up an alert saying the virus protection isn't active. "Does it need to be switched on ?". Don'tknow if it was just slow starting up, or if it wasn't running properly, as I hadn't had a chance to restart after installing.

She doesn't check her emails again so she didn't get the reply saying "Yes!"

So I see her in the evening and she asks me again, and I tell her again that it is important that it is switched on.

She stands up and starts running for her computer...

"Um, it only needs to be on when the computer is on".

The look of relief on her face

I still can't imagine what she thought it would do when the computer was switched off

Victoria J

[HawaiianShirts]

I'm kinda wishing that you had asked her what she thought was going on in her computer when it was turned off. You might have had a very amusing answer.

Some people believe weird stuff about computers. I had a customer once tell me that she didn't want to make her DSL connection at home into a wireless network. Why? Because she believed that "hackers" could use her wi-fi to visually see into her house.

[dalesys]

30 years or so ago we had someone in our Compuserve L5 group persuaded we could see them because we had "reverse video" on our computers.

[Victoria J]

I'm kinda wishing that you had asked her what she thought was going on in her computer when it was turned off. You might have had a very amusing answer.
[/i].

Sadly I know too much about how she believes computers work. I hate having these conversations with her. It causes me actual pain as I try and get my head round her confusion, and her pain because I just cannot fully hide my scorn.

She believed that if she got a wireless router she could use her internet on a train.

Last night I went round and her computer was broken (I fear it's something fairly catastrophic, I'm going to have a proper look at it over the weekend and may ask for advice in a sepearate thread. I fear it's beyond me anyway).

She asked me whether, if she buys a new computer, she will have to contact her internet provider to arrange for them to send her email somewhere different.



I just stared at her for a while. She insisted I answer so I tried to explain it as the internet provider always leaves it in the same place on their computer and you just tell your computer how to pick it up.

She's suspicious for some reason and thinks I'm keeping something from her

Oh - the absolute hell of letting her check her email via my netbook. Which first involved me setting it up so her emails went to gmail as for some reason her internet providers webcheck page is so useless you can't actually read emails on it. She knows how to use a computer, she isn't actually that bad at using one providing she doesn't have to think about how it works, but because this was a little bit different she forgot everything she knew.

She accidentally closed her browser and got into my email (I'd opened her account in chrome, over mine in firefox) and couldn't understand why all the email was different

She also managed to OK some sort of clean up to free memory and I still don't know what she let it delete

Victoria J