How computer illiterate are your friends/family?

[MartyBuntu]

Not to imply that anyone that's "technology impaired" is stupid...so I'll keep it light:

- A friend of mine doesn't know how to take a picture with his cell phone.

- I switched our family computer's web browser over to Firefox way back when it was at Ver. 0.8. Knowing that my wife hates anything "new" in the world of computers, I simply used the Internet Explorer icon on her desktop, but it actually loads Firefox. She only found out 2 weeks ago (when I told her).

- Another family friend, up until a year ago, didn't know that you could minimise windows, so would just close the program and start it up again when she needed it.

[athenroy]

Sounds like my room mate, Roberta! Technologically challenged! I like the one about Firefox! I should try that with her! :D Oh, here's one for you. Roberta's daughter used to live across the street and use our WiFi. I gave her a USB WiFi adaptor I wasn't using at the time, you know, just a little bigger than a flash drive. Time passed, now she lives next door. Since I used my WiFi adaptor on another machine, I told here she would have to buy one. I get a call, "I can't set this up, keeps telling me I need an internet connection", I go over and look, sure enough, she bought a router and not an WiFi adaptor! And she was the one that installed my old one, so she knew what they looked like! Long story, short, I went with her to exchange the router for the WiFi adaptor! :D

[Linuxratty]

I have a friend who is a MRI tec, but he has no interest in learning much about Windows,much less doing anything different,like installing Fire Fox. He basically uses whatever Katherine puts on it for him.

Another friend is so fearful of doing anything;

* it took him two years to screw up the courage to make a Yahoo e mail account.

* He ordered a copy of Open Office for his Windows box and was afraid to install it.

* He is afraid to install Fire Fox cause it asks too many questions.

* He is afraid to install Skype cause it's too big.

I tried really hard to get him to use Linux,but he went ahead and got a machine with Windows 7 cause Linux is scary and different.

[MartyBuntu]

I can't tell you how many people I know that, after purchasing a widescreen monitor, don't change the aspect ration, so their screen is actually an abnormally stretched 4:3.

Same goes for the ones that watch standard definition TV shows with their LCD/plasma screens set to "FULL SCREEN"...

...because "it uses up the whole screen...and that's what I paid for".

[Apollo87]

One day my roomate had one of his friends over who saw me navigate to google on my linux box, and he said 'Oh, you can get google on linux?'. I was speechless.

[Thewhistlingwind]

One day my roomate had one of his friends over who saw me navigate to google on my linux box, and he said 'Oh, you can get google on linux?'. I was speechless.

*Shrug* Pretty much everything except some native windows apps.

[Random_Dude]

- I switched our family computer's web browser over to Firefox way back when it was at Ver. 0.8. Knowing that my wife hates anything "new" in the world of computers, I simply used the Internet Explorer icon on her desktop, but it actually loads Firefox. She only found out 2 weeks ago (when I told her).


http://www.freesoftwaremagazine.com/files/www.freesoftwaremagazine.com/nodes/3560/strip.jpg

[whatthefunk]

My parents kept getting viruses on the pc. I installed firefox for them, made it secure but not annoyingly so and then told them to use it because it was safer than IE. My dad said he didnt understand it and kept using IE. About a week later, their system froze up and they had to take the whole thing into the shop to have it fixed. He has since instructed me to never put firefox on his computer again because he swears that firefox, which he never even used, put some sort of malicious hex on his computer. They still get viruses....

[Lucradia]

Most of my family isn't really good at computers, with the exception of the woman who bore life to me.

[u-noob-tu]

My sister has an almost 4 year old dell inspiron laptop that came with ubuntu 8.10, if i remember correctly (no one in my family lets me touch any of their computers or cell phones). one day she remarked how it was "messing up". i asked how so, and she just continues to say "messing up" with no further details. so i take a look at it and go into the update manager and i was shocked by the fact that she had over 900 updates available. As it would turn out, the only thing she ever bothered to use on her computer was firefox (i didnt even check what version that was). she had never gone into any of the settings, never used "add/remove software", nothing. to this day, she continues to say that "it doesnt work right", but cant tell me whats wrong.

as for the rest of my family, it seems that half are completely helpless with technology (especially my grandmother, bless her heart, she tries so hard) and dont care to learn, and the other half know just enough and dont care to learn anymore. fortunately, my younger inherited the old PC, which he asked me to put linux on. he's getting better... slowly :p

[Copper Bezel]

The Firefox-broke-my-computer story and the widescreen display set to Stretch I experienced with a couple of inlaws (who are no longer inlaws, incidentally.) Things like that irritate me to degrees I can't express; if you have an expensive piece of kit, respect it enough to learn how it works, and if you don't know how something works, shut up and listen to the grown-up in the room.

My remaining family mostly know what they're doing, and I certainly don't have to do tech support for them. I don't communicate much with my coworkers, but I did talk to one person who didn't know that she could access her personal e-mail account with her new iPad, and I did have someone ask me if "they took down the school home page" because someone had deleted the Explorer icon from the desktop. A couple of levels of fail there.

[BrokenKingpin]

My friends are very computer literate as a lot of them come from comp sci backgrounds (like me). My family on the other hand, not so much. My brother knows his way around computers, but my parents are pretty useless with them.

[nmccrina]

- A friend of mine doesn't know how to take a picture with his cell phone.


Okay, in his defense I usually fail at this also. I've stopped agreeing to take pictures of people with their cell phones because it's a PITA. The other day this girl wanted to get a picture with my coworker and handed me an Android phone with the camera already going. I naturally assumed the large round button would be to take the picture, but nooooo it exits. So she got the camera going again, pointed out the correct button, and explained that you have to hold it down for a bit. So I held it down and the phone shuts off. Turns out you don't hold it down *that* long. Well, after that I gave up. I'll grep, vim, cat and sed all day, but these phones are too much. And I'm only 22. ](*,)

[MartyBuntu]

Okay, in his defense I usually fail at this also. I've stopped agreeing to take pictures of people with their cell phones because it's a PITA.


Yeah, but his phone actually has a physical button on the side that you use to take the pics. Not only that, but his phone plan allows for him to integrate his ISP provided email address, so he can send and receive pics which would benefit his work. But he hasn't set up the email account because, "Uhhh...yeah...I'll get to that one day...uhhh..."

I'll give him credit though...he did learn how to respond to a text message about 6 months ago.;)