GREAT POST!!!!!!

I had a very similar process to go through with my wife's Mom (passed on now, but tremendous fun to be with while we had her....) - she was not the least bit comfortable with ANY form of personal computer when she started.

We tried her on a Win98 laptop to start with and that effort went into the toilet pretty fast! Her battle cry was, "I'm gonna pitch this stupid thing out the window and see if it flies!".....and she meant it. Next was a G3 PowerBook on OS9 and that went somewhat better, but the hardware was pretty worn by the time she had it and it too was threatened with "Flying" more often than not.

Her ultimate computer was the 2009 iMac....the larger screen and full sized keyboard helped a lot. I still got many calls about how she had "killed the damned thing", but mostly it was simply an issue of how she had changed something in the Mail window that she couldn't figure out how to get back her "normal" view....."HELP, I've lost ALL my emails!!!!"

Her progression went from being totally in fear of the whole thing, to ultimately being able to surf and research topics across the net, send and receive emails with friends and family all over the country (and the world while I was deploying), and recognizing when there was a REAL problem with the computer before calling for help....she was able to analyze network issues and reboot her DSL Modem and router to regain connectivity when it went down, however, it DID take three hard drive replacements before we got her to shut down the system during thunderstorms wait for the electrical service to come back on steady before going back online.

Calling her from Afghanistan using Skype out in order to walk her through a computer problem remotely was one of our favorite topics of wonder among the rest of the family.....all were amazed that we could get her IT hiccups resolved so simply.

She's been gone now for nearly a year and I miss her, but it wouldn't surprise me to get a call late one night just to let me know that her new system seems to be working just fine.

They say that no good deed goes unpunished, so for all my efforts described above over the past 15 years with her......my reward was LOT'S of email forwards.


Freedom is never free....thank a Service member today.