My father, who will hopefully turn 80 in April, has a Dell PC running Windows XP. We’ve thought about getting him a new PC with Windows 8 or 10 on it, but he would have to learn a new OS and would likely get frustrated and give up. He lives 1200 miles away so I can’t run over to his house every other day to help him out. As it is, he calls me 3-4 times a week with questions and issues that I have to diagnose over the phone for him… but I’m not complaining. :rolleyes:
Recently he started getting a daily message that says that Google will no longer provide updates to Chrome on Window XP at the end of the year. After a quick search I found this.
I don’t care that Chrome isn’t going to be supported on XP and have explained to him that everything should continue to work as it does today. My dad doesn’t want to see this same message every day for the next 10 months and wants to turn it off. He contacted Microsoft and they said he would have to purchase a $99 support agreement before they would tell him how to turn it off. :dubious:
Does anyone know if there is a way to turn off this message so he doesn’t have to see it every day? It’s a minor annoyance for him, but he complains about it constantly to me. I can’t seem to find an answer searching the Internet.
I realize this isn’t the answer to the question you were asking but I faced a similar situation with my mother and her computer. She’s 80 and was used to her computer which ran XP. But in her case we had to replace her computer.
Rather than buy her a new laptop, we bought her a used laptop that a computer dealer had reconditioned. I found literally dozens of possible laptops I could pick from at various dealers so they’re not hard to find. And the best thing was that most of the dealers recognized that Windows 8 was crap so they had loaded them with Windows 7, which is close enough to XP that my mother had no trouble making the switch.
By the way, you mentioned having to diagnose stuff for him over the phone. I support my mother at a distance and use Team Viewer to see her desktop remotely. I can either walk her through doing something or I can take control and do it for her. So you might look into a remote control program like that.
An older friend of mine who I help with her old Vista laptop was pestering me about this this morning. She told me “Google won’t support blah blah blah.” I thought she was nuts. Apparently this is the message she got too, as I have her using Chrome. Glad to see this thread so I can update her laptop.
I had the exact same situation with my 90 yo MIL a couple weeks ago.
Her ancient XP machine finally fried the mobo. So I bought a used reconditioned corporate desktop with a fresh Win7 install. $149 plus shipping. Ka-ching. Once I got all her apps installed & her contents copied off the dead PC (via external disk enclosure), she was happy.
I’d been putting off replacing her PC for months now because of my fear of switching her to Win7. Because her learning ability & short-term memory is fading by the week. She hardy even blinked at the changes. I was amazed. Go old folks!!
Here’s another related tip that may help someone someplace …
Her Office 2003 install was getting real old & unpatchable. IMO she wasn’t going to react well to the ribbon interface in Office 2007 or later. For her, pretty much if the clickable button isn’t visible, it doesn’t exist and can’t be hunted for.
I stumbled on Libreofffice: http://www.libreoffice.org/ . It’s a free open source Office clone with an Office 2003 style interface. Tastes great; lasts a long time. I’m a new fan. At least for that mission.
I do want to point out that Firefox will continue to support Windows XP for quite a while longer, and you can make it pretty much look like Chrome fairly easily.
Or, if you want to stick with Blink-powered web browsers, I see no sign that Opera is going to end support for Windows XP. It will look like Chrome from the get-go. And there’s an extension you can install that will let you install any Chrome extensions in Opera.
Or, if you’re a bit more adventurous, you can just install the open source version of Chrome, Chromium with an automatic updater. The version I linked comes with Flash support, so you should be all set. It’s just Chrome without a few proprietary components.
All of these are better than just sticking with old Chrome. And, unlike upgrading to Windows 7 or 10, they don’t cost anything.
Yeah, but that’s really an unofficial version. Plus Pale Moon itself is kinda strange. They keep up with security updates, but seem to not be keeping up with newer HTML5 features.
For now, it’s not a big deal, but if sites ever start depending on these newer HTML5 features, it could become a problem. Right now, their saving grace is all those people still using Internet Explorer.
Though what I read about Goanna and version 26.0 may help deal with this: I haven’t tested it yet.