While continuing to appreciate all the responses, I’m wondering if a lot of the pad recommendations have had practical test use by a lot of genuine senior citizens. I’m not quite there yet, but I’d never use a pad myself if I can help it – hard to read, hard to hold, hard to use the touchscreen.
The whole pad experience reminds me of smartphones, which I despise for all these reasons. As for my mom, she’s absolutely unable to use a smartphone – can’t see the screen well enough, and can’t touch the screen in the precise correct place. I’m 20 years younger but I barely can myself. It almost seems intuitive to me that using a small screen and touching tiny, virtual buttons is more of a young person thing, but I guess me and Mom could both be complete outliers. Wouldn’t be the first time!
At any rate, the only thing that’s going to work is a very traditional desktop-at-a-desk-with-a-monitor setting, though I totally get that you can drive this setup with a pad connected to a traditional keyboard and traditional (huge) monitor. Not ruling out that setup at all. But she’s not going to mess around with touching a touchscreen, and I can’t blame her.
Alexa is called Henry in our house. We don’t know anyone named Henry.
Oh boy. My dad discovered that you can have multiple desktops. Each one was wall to wall shortcuts. You couldn’t find a thing. “That’s an interesting website, I’m going to make a shortcut”. And there was the organizing his computer episode. He moved all files by extension type to to a folder named, say .exe, or .dll. Ummm. What a mess. I think I just said f’it and rebuilt his computer.
My mom was the same. No way a touch screen would work. I’m pretty much the same. I so have a 13" laptop that works for some easy things. But If it’s not a quick look up, I’ll be on my desktop with a 43" screen.
A question @Briny_Deep, your mom is on a sat dish? Do you know the company? My mom absolutely put her foot down on going to fiber over copper. She misinterpreted a ton of BS she read on the net. But I needed it for when I took care of her a couple of days a month (I can work remote). I ended up just doing it.
Here is a problem my wife could never solve and if I shuffle off before she does, I don’t know what she will do. She told me her internet has stopped responding. So I go in there and indeed, nothing responds. One of the first things I do is to check if she is connected to our Wi-Fi. So I reconnect and problem is solved.
How did she get disconnected? Damfino. My best guess is solar flares. Indeed, there were a few days ago. I don’t think anything she did could have disconnected. I would love to get a foolproof computer, but they don’t exist.
But another question. Why didn’t it reconnect automatically. When I reboot my computer, it does. Maybe if she had rebooted (which she does not know how to do) it would have.
Her latest computer forced her to use Win-11. It is not even obvious how to reboot. The power icon is a little thing off in a corner, unlike in Win-10. I told her to hold the on/off button for 10 seconds but she cannot remember which button that is.
I think so; no I don’t; and she doesn’t either. I think her housemate pays that bill, but I can’t really work with the housemate on this situation for various reasons.
(Yes, it’s really way past time for a POA as someone mentioned upthread, and that would be great too, but she can take care of herself just fine, thank-you-very-much. But here we are getting beyond the scope of this particular topic, not to mention this forum. She does what she can; and I do what I can for her, short of quitting my job; and we muddle along for another day at least.)
I’m not quite sure what this even means, I’m sorry. But I think changing ISPs is out of the question. Probably there’s only one game in town, but even if there’s a choice, that’s not the sort of thing that’s going to happen at this point. They don’t have the will or the means or the ability to do something like that. I fear that even the project of this thread may end up being only a pipe dream. Still, she does manage to use the PC at least monthly to pay her bills; it’s just too painful to be a pleasure. She wants it to be a pleasure again, so that’s the hope: that ease of use could be improved to the point where you use the thing just for fun.
Thanks again to all in this thread. I hope all the discussion is useful to others as well – definitely it is to me.
My universe of data consists of my 85 year old mother, my 76 year old mother-in-law, and my late father.
The iPad is large enough for them to see - all had cataract lens replacements, a consistent user interface that is relatively static and things don’t move around, virtually immune to viruses, and portable to move around.
Computers are more complicated than they used to be, but they can still be taught the old way.
This is your hard drive. All your files are either on it or on some other volume, or stored entirely elsewhere on somebody else’s computer. When we open your hard drive, we see folders. Each folder can have subfolders. So each file is somewhere in a hierarchy of drive, folder, subfolder, or else it isn’t on your computer at all and you get to it some other way.
Files on your computer are divided up into applications (also called programs) and documents. Here’s an example of the relationship of application to document: [ open a word processor, create a letter to grandma, save it (navigating the hierarchy of folders and subfolders to save it in a specific place), exit the word processor. show where the document was saved, viewing it from the outside ].
Some applications aren’t for creating documents. Games. Web browsers. Utility programs. But they’re like verbs, they exist to do things, or to let you do things.
This is the network. This is how your computer hooks up to signals from other computers. Here is the hardware, see this cable, see this wireless router? OK your computer talks to those here. It’s like tuning your radio or switching your TV to the right channel. Here are your channel settings.
This is how you reboot the computer. This is how you shut down the computer. This is how you reboot in safe mode if something goes wrong. This is how you reboot from a different volume if you ever need to.
Here are settings. Here is where you look if you want to change behaviors that are system-wide like how the mouse or keyboard behaves or how bright the monitor is. Here are settings inside a specific application, which only affect behavior within that application like whether to underline misspelled words.
It’s funny you should bring up these concepts. You read the OP, right? Mom didn’t know that Amazon.com is a website, which you visit using an internet browser, and crucially, still doesn’t know. “Her Amazon” worked for a while, then didn’t, and now it does again. Both mom and dad are completely innocent of these larger ideas, and they’re both very smart (multiple masters’ degrees) and not that bloody old. And they’ve both had personal computers since the 90’s, for heaven’s sake.
But a concept like “Launch Firefox, then type something in an address bar” or worse, “download this email attachment, save it somewhere on your hard drive, then open it in Microsoft Word to edit it” is absolutely, completely, 100% foreign to both of them, not for lack of trying on my part over decades now. When I talk like this, they tell me to stop being a tech nerd, tell somebody else.
There’s a mental disconnect regarding computers in both of them, and I can’t tell exactly what it is. Part of it must be willful, but it’s not a malicious or contemptuous ignorance, simply an utter and all-consuming lack of interest. I expect it’s as if you tried to teach me differential calculus; I can listen attentively, I can even retain a concept here and there, but there’s no way in hell I’ll reach an understanding. I want calculus to be used to put satellites in orbit so I can watch Netflix; I’m not interested in doing calculus myself, and can’t launch any satellites. I expect they’re the same way about all things computers – they just want it to work for the things they want to do, and that’s absolutely it.
This is exactly like what it’s like for me to deal with my soon-to-be-90 father, when it comes to computers. He has an MBA, he’s a retired professor emeritus with the UW Extension, and he used to use computers all the time. But, after he retired, and particularly over the past decade, he simply stopped using computers, and all of that old knowledge has faded away.
Based on what I’ve read in this thread, I’m leaning towards getting a Chromebook for him (a full keyboard is likely to be easier for him to use), setting the Chrome browser up with a couple of links to online versions of newspapers, and making (and printing out) a detailed series of instructions on what he needs to do to read those newspapers, without any attempts to explain “this is how your computer works” – it’d just muddy things.
Generally, he is, though he’s frustrated by his physical limitations (most of which only really developed in the past five years). He’s extremely aware of the fact that he’s made it to an age that no other of his blood relatives reached, and he thinks about that a lot (and that it means the time must be running out).
Over the course of this thread so far, I’ve come to believe what’s going to make a difference is 90% achieving remote access / screenshare; and 10% getting her a new machine, which I’ll set up myself, that’s not already filled with crapware and malware, and doesn’t inappropriately (for its specs) try to run Win11.
What about an all-in-one desktop running ChromeOS? Something like this:
It does have a touchscreen, but there’s no need to ever use it, since it has a plain keyboard and mouse. (I haven’t used that machine personally and so I can’t recommend it specifically; it’s just an example)
There’s nothing modern, nor pertaining to the elderly per se, about any of this.
In the early 1990s our office had a secretary who just could NOT adjust to the computer. Windows 3.11 for Workgroups. She would say things like “I started to type a letter to the Board of Managers, and it didn’t open a letter. Why can’t it tell that what I’m typing is a letter? I don’t understand why I need to tell it!”
Yeah, I’m not without sympathy but that’s not how computers worked in 1993 and it’s not how they work thirty years later either.
You can’t teach people who fundamentally don’t want to know how the computer works, but a 90 year old student can follow the basics as easily as a 20 year old student. Noun, then verb. Select something and then do things to it. Gain a grasp of the hierarchy. Understand also that some things are not on your computer, you just view them there.
You no longer need to know how to BinHex or UUEncode a file in order to insert it into your email message to use it as a file attachment. You no longer need to up the allocation of RAM to the specific application you’re trying to run because it could not do its functions without more RAM. Upgrading your operating system no longer requires you to download something that you then manually launch which reboots your computer and needs you to keep clicking OK buttons. When saving your file you don’t need to type the three-letter extension without which the application that created it won’t be able to reopen it. Things have in many ways gotten simpler.
Not in all ways. Back in the day, any file you dealt with was, by definition, on your computer. There was a time when you didn’t have to worry your little head about networking or remote locations.
But it’s still a tolerable scope of understandings. Those people who don’t start off with an attitude of “this is too complicated and I don’t understand why they set it up this way and I don’t care just show me how to get my freaking email” are perfectly capable of learning how the thing is set up, even if they aren’t ready to modify their registry or insert an entry into their .hosts file from the command line.
Well, I’ve been thinking about the same problem for my own 93-year-old grandmother. She does pretty well, all things considered, but recently made the error of clicking yes when Microsoft asked to install Windows 11. Unfortunately, it’s a 4 GB machine and Win11 is such a hog that the machine is almost unusable now.
She only uses it for the web–email, Facebook, and a couple of others. I’d like to see the machine locked down aside from that. But she wants a keyboard, mouse, and large screen. So a ChromeOS desktop has advantages over either a standard desktop or a tablet.
But here we are getting beyond the scope of this particular topic, not to mention this forum. She does what she can; and I do what I can for her, short of quitting my job; and we muddle along for another day at least.)