Found a good post about what software people are installing on their parents/relatives computers when they go home for thanksgiving. One benefit to me of living at home still: I can keep the family computers set up and in tip-top shape so they never get to the “spend five hours fixing everything that’s wrong” phase (and five hours is sometimes an understatement!).
Anyway, the “post is over at Slashdot”:http://slashdot.org/articles/04/11/19/2331210.shtml?tid=126 and it’s interesting when some of the comments are about why some people won’t fix family/friends computers any more. They have some pretty darned good reasons, too. I can sympathize, although I am blessed to have an immediate family who has really learned a lot about what to do and not to do on the computer. Friends run the gamut though, as far as tech-savvy goes. But, I don’t mind helping most people out if it doesn’t take a huge amount of my already limited time, and I especially don’t mind if they are willing to learn how not to cause problems in the first place, instead of me cleaning up and them re-trashing. I especially like those that I’ve convinced to switch to “Firefox”:http://firefox.scriptek.com/ but I do have a couple of utilities that will lock down IE a bit more to prevent some spyware/adware. I’ll have to put together a little “install this stuff to help fix your computer” post here sometime; now’s not the time.
I do like that some people have started supporting Linux only (at least when they do free support), as it’s really more secure in my opinion, or at least easier to get that way from a default install. It can be just as bad, true, but I won’t get into that argument here. For now, Windows runs too much stuff that Linux either won’t run or would take a lot of time to get running, for most of my uses (however Linux rocks as a server!).
One person “makes an argument”:http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=130321&cid=10873799 for switching to Mac:
Getting a Mac is a huge advantage for two reasons:
- 1. Other Mac users never bug you with questions, since they’d have to admit that their OS was less than 100% intuitive if they did) and,
- 2. You can happily claim ignorance of every other platform. Saying `Hey, I use a Mac! I don’t understand Windows/Linux. See how shiny my Mac is! Shiny!’ gets me out of a lot of things (as long as people don’t notice the headless FreeBSD box hidden behind my desk).
I have to admit this is a good strategy, and would be for me if I used Macs exclusively (or at all personally), or didn’t work at a job where I support a Windows network (thereby giving me reason to “know” Windows anyway). Funny to read about, anyway.
Another person seems to “have a list”:http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=130321&cid=10873699 that is rather similar to mine as far as installs go. I don’t install all of those on all computers, it depends on the user, but I wouldn’t be against any of those apps.
More later maybe :-)