Article needs a ten-year update:
I drives me batty when someone spends all the time to mouse over to and click on the browser refresh button. Just hit F5 already!! sheesh
Anybody with aged relative problems ever think to get them a netbook customized with their browser of choice, and email program of choice? Get one of the custom cover decals made with “Gramps Email” or something like that so they have a special email computer they can sit in a comfy chair to read their emails and see the grandkids pictures on that can travel with them … Point out that they don’t have to sit at a desk any more, they can use a lap desk on their sofa, bed or in a lounge chair … and since it is so squeeliciously small, it can travel with them so they never have to worry about missing a smidgeon of glurge [and they never have to touch your computer] - you can set it up so it will automatically link to your wifi at home, and get them a matching wireless router for their home and pop for getting a real tech to set it up for them. That way it will automatically work at their home and your home …
My response: ‘Good Christ, no. Then I’d have two computers I’d be constantly asked to clean up, ‘fix,’ and look stuff up on.’
My brother’s response: ‘She won’t use a laptop [he gave her his when she was visiting] or a netbook because she doesn’t like a flat keyboard.’
PS – that does sound like a good solution for reasonable people, though! 
A netbook for elderly relatives? They can’t read the screen. They can’t read the screen on a 17 inch notebook. I’m 52, and I can barely use a netbook, even with appropriate glasses.
And they’d still want to use my email address at my house since everyone knows email addresses are just like phone numbers. It would be like I bought them a phone and plugged it in at my house.
Good for you, but search is a way better system for almost everyone. I don’t need to keep things organized. I don’t need to come up with a naming or organizational system. Why would I want to spend my time or mental effort on that? I just tell my computer what I’m looking for, and it gets it for me in less time than it would have taken me to navigate a hierarchical file system.
Embrace the future
I dunno. I look at it like my keys. It seemed every other day I’d find my former roommate hunting all over the house, in his car, and the path between his car and the door, for his keys. I’ve never had to do that, because I know where I put my keys. They’re in my pants pocket. When I’m finished with a key, I immediately return the keyring to my pocket rather than setting it down on the nearest flat surface. I apply the same principle to my documents.
Also, search features aren’t that good at finding files with non-descriptive names. I have tens of thousands of JPEG photos on my computer, and the majority of them have whatever arcane name the photographer’s digital camera assigned them (“HCM000217.jpg”). Giving them all descriptive names would be a waste of my time. So if I have a bunch of, erm, “artistic depictions” of a young woman named Betty, then those photos are going into a folder named “Betty”, which itself is a subfolder within the folder “Artistic Depictions”. And if I want to look at my photos of Betty, I can get to the “Betty” folder in 3-4 mouse clicks, which is better than 1 mouse click + 6 keystrokes (b-e-t-t-y-<enter>) followed by waiting for Spotlight to cough up the results.
OTOH, I’m also an OCD organizational freak.
A lot of the “other people using computer” stuff that frustrates me has already been mentioned, but I’m going to throw in a general annoyance at people in first world countries who are just completely clueless about computers in general.
Personal Computers have been around and generally affordable for about 15 years now (by my reckoning). They’re not mysterious alien technology recently discovered in the ruins of a flying saucer from a distant galaxy. Most people under 50 should, IMHO, have at least a basic familiarity with the general concept and use of Windows or MacOS, Word, and e-mail.
I don’t expect the average person to know keyboard shortcuts, file extensions, or that sort of thing - but they should know that the correct response to “What sort of computer have you got?” is not “A white one”, and the answer to “What sort of operating system are you using, Windows or Mac?” shouldn’t be “I don’t know”.
I understand people my parents age not being super computer literate (although my parents are actually pretty good with computers) - but it’s completely inexcusable, IMHO, for people in their 20s to just have absolutely no idea at all about them.
I used to get frustrated with this when I first got on the Internet (1996). I’d ask somebody what kind of computer they had and they’d answer “A Dell” or “a Compaq”. But I realized that maybe the question wasn’t clear enough, and started asking, “Are you using Mac or Windows?” instead. Plus, being 1996, I suspect a lot of those people didn’t even know what a Mac was.
Isn’t saying “A Dell” or “a Compaq” more precise than just saying “windows”?
No, it’s not. It’s like someone asking you what kind of breakfast cereal you prefer and you say Kellogg’s or General Mills. The brand name on a non-Apple computer is essentially meaningless.
Well, ZenBeam is correct. But at the time — and I guess it’s more of a semantics problem than anything — my “issue” was that they weren’t answering the question I was asking, in that “kind” =/= “brand”. Plus, I may not have been aware of Linux yet in 1996, but I’d heard of UNIX and I knew there were still other operating systems that would run on a “PC”. OS/2 wasn’t quite dead yet.
It was an “annoyance” that I admit was partially based in my own ignorance. I don’t think I realized at the time just how overwhelmingly dominant Windows had become. I’d just gotten my first Mac, and the last time I had used Macs, a few years earlier, Apple was still doing fairly well. It didn’t take long for me to simply start assuming that everybody I was talking to on the Internet was using Windows unless they stated otherwise.
But “IRL”, the computer-savvy people I knew would always say “Windows” when asked the same question, so it threw me a bit when people on the 'Net would respond with brand names instead of their OS.
But since Apple is the only manufacturer of Apple computers, doesn’t a “Dell” answer automatically imply “Windows”?
Dell has shipped Linux systems since the '90s.
Manufacturer is really a perfectly correct answer to the “kind of computer” question, and the more computer savvy someone is, the less likely you would hear an answer like “windows” unless the context was clearly trying to determine mac/windows (like “I understand most of your company uses windows, but which kind of computer do your creative people use?”.
Which the average punter has never seen. And people who use Linux tend to be pretty computer savvy, IME
I worked in electronics retail for over a decade, and asking someone what sort of computer they had was indeed a (usually) effective way to find out the operating system - if someone says “I have a Compaq” (for example), I’d ask them when they brought it new, and based on the year would have a pretty good chance of working out which version of Windows they were running.
3-4 mouse clicks is faster for you than 7 keystrokes (you can launch Spotlight with a keystroke)? It isn’t for me by a long shot.
That’s because humans are not very good or fast at searching. Computers are. If all I had to do on the way out the door was say “keys” and they’d show up in front of me, I wouldn’t bother coming up with a special place to put them either.
I agree that you need to give things a name worth searching for, or have them be text documents that the searching application can index.
The initial mouse click in my sequence was the click on the Spotlight icon in the menu bar.
I did recently see a photo depicting a “future, highly-advanced” Google search. It showed a guy typing in, “Where the hell are my damn keys?!” and Google responding, “On top of the refrigerator where you left them, dumbass.” 
Something my boss has started doing lately: rather than emailing a copy of document that needs to be updated (like a schedule or project documentation) and asking for updates, he will call me and say “I’m going to share my desktop with you” (he’s in an office 400 miles away) and then he makes me go through the document with him and tell him what needs to be updated while he very slowly types it in. Of course he’s also got “Track Changes” turned on in the document, so every time he changes something it shows as a tracked change then he right-clicks it to accept the change. And half the time his changes screw up the formatting, so he has to back out the change and start again. Gah! First of all, I don’t have time for this shit! (And I’ve started to tell him that, although in nicer language.) Second, turn your stupid Track Changes off! You don’t need that on (in my opinion) if you’re the only one making the updates!
I know. But you can launch Spotlight with a keystroke. I believe it defaults to Cmd-Space, but you can set it to whatever you want. No clicks needed.
I love that picture. Someday…