Reply #46: Believe me, I have tried - but he just doesn't get it

[csziggy]

Like I said - the best thing would be to wipe the whole thing out and start fresh. If I could spend a week downstate with him, I would do that.

He fought tooth and nail to keep his 286 going and still complains about having to use Windows. He went straight from DOS 5 to Windows 98, then to Windows XP when the 98 desktop died. Every time, he says, "This will be the last operating system I learn!" At 87, he is still doing OK so I doubt that is true - and hope it is not.

Maybe I will get him a new computer next Christmas with Windows 7 on it and an administrator account that he does not have the password for. Put him into a user account that does not have privileges so he can't install stuff. But he would pitch a fit!

He would probably have liked going direct from DOS to Linux, but Linux was not really ready for most people at the point his 286 finally died.

I just went to Windows 7 - my XP desktop quit working last week and I had the local shop put together a nice basic machine. It turns out that my old one's problems were mostly a dying harddrive, not even the boot drive. I've used Testdisk to get just about everything back from the sick drive, and all my important data that was on it. You know you have problems when the Western Digital diagnostics quit without completing testing and tell you it is seriously bad. Since the data seems to be OK, I suspect maybe the controller card is bad, not the discs themselves.

Windows 7 is great - but I have not loaded the Security Essentials. I'll get that as soon as I finish off-loading the data I recovered - that has a little over a half hour remaining. Too much computer stuff in the last week - backing up, rescuing, setting up new, etal.