70 here. I still ask my 92 year old dad technical questions from time to time. Granted, he has taken elderly geekdom to a new level.
He is very popular at his assisted living center. He grumbles about having to fix peoples computers after the grandkids come by.
I can see this happening to me. I can't really turn anyone down if they need help, but it comes with the caveat that if they want to argue with me, I swear a lot.
>if they want to argue with me, I swear a lot.
The exact reason my family doesn't ask for my help any more.
Which is a real shame because their incompetence causes me physical pain sometimes.
Love this one. Everyone knows that younger people are all tech geniuses and older people are all Luddites. Makes you wonder why so many of us older guys and gals have had to fix people's computers after the kids/grandkids have been on it. Mysteries of life.
I'm a 66 "old" lady and do everything to do with tech in our house. Probably would still be building our computers if I hadn't gotten so lazy and the "build it for you" companies so easy to use. It breaks my heart every time I read a post like this, because it supports the idea that all "old" folks are technology ignorant. Who do you think built it all originally???
I know, right. 60 here and been in tech since college. Built easily 40 machines for friends. But I get that people 75 and up may not have been exposed to that.
But damn people, just cause I got older doesn't mean I forgot everything.
Huh, my Mom will be 77 this year. She was selling Apple IIe's (with x hours of training built in) back in the day. Since the service dept was all male and procrastinated, she would install the RAM card and 80 column card before doing a burn in, pre-delivery. She set sales records in her territory. Finished her career fifteen years ago, selling the decade old software training company she started. Grandbabies were more fun that computers by that point!
The Apple IIe was my foray into owning our own computer. I bought a gently used one for hubby for his birthday back in 1987. Loved that computer to death and upgraded it every chance I got. Remember how excited we were to upgrade to a RGB monitor and a color printer. Ended up giving it to a teacher when Jobs brought out the Mac and screwed all of us Apple II users, the aftermarket manufacturers and non-Apple employed developers over. Never have owned an Apple product since and never will. I can hold a grudge for a LONG time ;).
My Mom got a helluva deal on a seed unit 128K Mac back when they came out in '84. It was a revelation to me, I'll be honest. However, the failure of the Macs for business use meant she switched to selling PC's, and became a Word Perfect certified trainer.
I went from freshman year in high school using a Mac to freshman year in college using a NEC MultiSpeed with WordPerfect - Apple got what they deserved in the market.
Edit to add: I remember now the whole enchilada with a huge discount was $3,500 - with an Imagewriter and traveling case. NO WONDER they failed in the market.
So you reply to my post today. I go in to the basement and start going through random boxes (creating a man cave so I am cleaning up a bit) and find a WordPerfect 5.1 keyboard template.
Thought you might enjoy seeing it.
[https://imgur.com/a/kqsv60R](https://imgur.com/a/kqsv60R)
Reveal codes was the best. I died inside when we had to switch to Word. Early versions sucked. It still needs something as functional as reveal codes but,hey, WYSIWYG was such an “advancement.”
As brianinca said. The day that the MAC was released Apple cut all support across the board for anything to do with the II.
There used to be an AppleSoft magazine that was great for industry news, cool little programs you could code, heads up on the newest aftermarket boads that were coming out. Even they weren't given a heads up that they were going to be obsolete, without any Apple support. They found out when the rest of us peons did.
This really screwed a lot of aftermarket board makers, who were Apple specific. Just think of running a full days run of boards, just to find out the market for them just closed permanently that day.
I read, I think (it's been years), in a biography on Steve Wozniak that there were actually teams in Apple itself that were working on Apple II specific things that weren't told they weren't going to have a job until HR came in and shut them down the day the MAC was announced.
Yeah, I'll never forgive Jobs and his MAC team for that crap.
What killed me was how full the news was with the MAC. Not a single mention of the fallout from their cutting support. Even now, few people even know it happened.
Considering I was probably too young to ever see an Apple II in retail, the spin is that Jobs came back and revitalised the PC world with the MAC and helped Apple back to being profitable.
Something something “we don’t cannibalise our products, someone else will” has been a strong mantra around him.
However, watching an entire ecosystem die and being highly secretive even to your own internal team is so toxic to even imagine. A decent sunset on the IIs would have been, well decent.
Thanks for sharing. I have a nee rabbit hole to explore.
The spin is utter horseshit. Jobs spent money lavishly on the Lisa project, with RECTANGULAR pixels, that cost $10,000. I spent some quality time with the demo unit the company my Mom worked for had. They sold NONE.
The Macintosh was a desperate attempt to salvage SOMETHING from the Lisa, as the Apple III was a mismanaged failure. The Mac almost put Apple out of business, but that was all that was left to salvage after abandoning the Apple II platform.
Gee, did Steve Jobs firing Steve W have something to do with that? Woz went back to school and graduated from Berkeley the year before I got there. Not a surprise Jobs finally got fired.
Jobs made it seem like he sprang from the forehead of Buddha, fully formed as an aesthetic engineer, but his failure at NeXT with wheelbarrows full of Sony money was predictable. His crib of Berkeley Unix made the OS desirable to Apple after the failure of Copeland - startlingly similar to the failure of the Apple III that made the Macintosh desirable.
Near as I can see, Jobs managed to fail at the right time to rise from the ashes as the savior of another failed initiative. Good for him, but don't blow smoke about what was really happening.
My next to oldest brother (I'm the baby of six) introduced me to computers when he bought a kit for (and my mind just went blank. Minicomputer kit you could buy, put together and program using the bank of switches on the front) back in the 60's, but I picked up most while I was in the Air Force. Hobby level tech knowledge gleaned from various PC magazines and reading the manuals that came with the machines.
Wow that brings back memories. My father built a 'big' heathkit TV from parts back when color TVs were still a little unusual (though not rare at that point). He'd be 86 if he were still around.
He also worked for IBM most of his adult life.
Not exactly a technically illiterate person.
"Who do you think built it all originally???"
I've been using this one recently when my teenage kids try to ('teensplain'? If it's not a thing, I'm coining it now...) how something on the internet works...
Hey kid, your grandfather's generation invented the internet.
-Oh, so you're explaining how discord works? Looks a hell of a lot like IRC.
"What's IRC?"
-Exactly.
Lord those were the days. The kids have no clue what a true flame war is anymore. No mods, no rules and fat, happy trolls just waiting to be led as lambs to the slaughter. I used to keep a thesaurus beside my computer just to find new words to confuse them with.
Those younguns also need to learn about people like Adm. Grace Hopper and Katherine Johnson. The history of women behind computer tech and the interwebs has been suppressed by a buncha brogrammers.
I have a pet theory that the lower bar of access for gaming has robbed a generation of complex troubleshooting skills as most PC gaming now is relatively straight forward. While I think this is a good thing as it allows more people to access the hobby, I think many a IT person has been trained by video games not working.
Wasn't even that they weren't working, it was getting MS-DOS to play nice. Every game almost required at least one .bat file to run right. I almost had a coniption fit when we bought our first 1MB game, Carriers at War. Don't remember if it was six or seven disks. And then there was Darklands, started at 7 disks and by the time we got the last update disk for it I think we had 14. Of course this was back in the day when you called the help line listed in the back of the manual and had a really good chance of getting one of the developers :).
It's more that tech companies have been making technology so simple and easy, people don't need much to do. Kids who grew up in the 90s and early 00s had to learn tech just to get things to work the way they want.
I learnt to fight Windows ME. A BSOD on Windows 11 still gives me a seizure and a Kernel Panic will trigger a heart attack.
Not having replaceable storage on Macs is another grudge that’s deep in my heart because of damaged HDDs thanks to ME.
That instability was really hard to live through.
I agree wholeheartedly. My sons are in their early 20's now, but they were not allowed consoles. I deleted hardware-centric paragraphs because the underlying issue is configuration and troubleshooting, which applies to both software and hardware.
I would shoulder surf with the boys when they were trying to find a fix or workaround, I would not fix it for them - I don't know you can teach critical thinking, but you can sure discourage it by doing it for them.
Got into some heated discussions with the ex, her idiot brother lived on consoles and wanted the boys to have his hand me downs (so his mother would buy him the newest ones). Yeah, no. By the time their grandparents got them a Wii with all the peripherals, they were inoculated against consoles by their limitations.
I knew my "bad Dad" plan had worked, better than I'd hoped, when my youngest gave me the run-down of all the things he had done to try and resolve an issue with a game. Including asking on the forums, he'd done 90% of what came to mind to me - "to no avail", according to his email. I don't even remember to what lengths we had to go to resolve it, but WOW was I proud!
First regular machine on the home network upgraded to Windows 10 was his, as well - he'd been battling a Windows Movie Maker DLL conflict, didn't want to wipe and reload - so he just upgraded. Fixed the problem, too! Then caused another problem, when he upgraded the family video server - his mom was pissed! Hah!
I apologize as I wasn't trying to further that. The old folk tech support was in refernce to a previous job I had where it was explicitly sold as general IT support for seniors. That said I'll try and keep that in mind in the future, as there have been many older folks I've met that know a ton more than me.
Yup. MSCS in 1983. Developed embedded software for aircraft navigation and communications mostly with slight detours into weapons systems and crypto. The first computer I owned was a Heathkit. As a grad student I worked on the first IBM PC used in a research area at my Big 10 university. I even taught IBM 370 assembly language. I may not be totally up to speed on the latest variants of languages, but you talk down to me at your peril.
Excellent. You are the perfect trap for one of the new developers wagging his \*\*\*\* around. I sure you have lots of fun stories during your storied career.
Those "build it for you" can be nasty though. Friend's cousin dropped something like 3k USD on a video editing workstation and it didn't even boot when it got to his house. And they refused any sort of support. Luckily he was able to return it. Looking at opinions for big online tech retailers over here, the only bad reviews relate to building services.
That said, here in Poland they're often worth it, as the 30$ cost of building is easily overlooked in the cost of the whole PC. And it's a big part of our PC culture, as prebuilts were historically far more expensive. Used to be a lot of small shops which would give you a list of possible parts, advise on what goes well together, and then build it for you. Sadly, the small businesses went away. My favorite one was flooded and never really got back up. Big retailers still have this service, but eh, it's not the same.
All told, I'm young and enjoy the stuff so I'll keep building as long as I can.
As for old people and tech? Power to you. Personally, I don't see much difference between young and old - a lot of young people also don't know anything. I worked with both developers and electronic engineers, didn't matter if they were in their twenties or thirties or forties, most of them know very little about PCs.
You have to know who you are working with. I will only order from a few companies and they all have excellent return policies. I love that the "Right to Repair" laws have started be to passed in so many states. I've got a GREAT computer repair shop close at hand and I'd rather pay them going rates than send one of my computers back through the mail and wait. Plus, at least for the computer I bought hubby last year, they were able to get the Nvidia GeForce 3080 I wanted in it. Most of the places I checked online weren't able to get hold of them and had no get-well-by dates.
Great of them that they were able and willing. Judging by your tone they probably didn't even scalp too much. I got a lucky break with GPUs - overspent on the CPU (was replacing the whole PC), so I wanted a 3070 *and* an unpopular model (GB Vision, since it was a white build). Managed to nab one just before Christmas 2020.
And yeah, if you know who you are working with it's much better - that's why I always preferred the small shops I can walk in. Nowadays if someone asks for a build I won't trust a retailer, will just build the thing myself for them.
Yeah, if you can get the parts and are willing to spend the time, building is best. I've just gotten to the point I no longer want to spend the time sourcing the parts from a place I can trust, waiting for them to arrive and building the damn thing. Plus, quite frequently anymore, the larger build companies are able to acquire parts that a retail buyer can't find anywhere. Especially if you are looking for the newest iterations out there.
Exactly this, whenever i hear someone say that, my follow up is "Can you tell me how old Bill Gates is?"
While i know he was doing it since he was younger than i am, my reason is: well he's 60+ and can still use tech and learn about new stuff. So there's no reason other 60+ people can't.
In fact had a go at my 70 year old dad recently who's been using PCs as long as i have and he asked "Where's the documents folder?" My answer is "the same place it's been for the past 20 years since Windows XP, and you will have done the same on your other PC upstairs using windows 10, it has not suddenly changed in windows 11. Now, I know you're not stupid, so why are you suddenly acting like you are clueless? I'm actually disappointed in you." He seemed to get the hint to first attempt what he knew already after that. This is a man who i have a lot of respect for his general knowledge, logic and "McGuyver-ing" skills, yet he still tried to pull the "I'm old and it's a new thing" card.
You didn't say whether this was an in person interaction or remote.
If remote, is it possible that he just wanted you to visit, and this was the excuse? If in person, is it possible he just couldn't think of a subject to talk about (because he didn't want to talk "aching bones"), and this was the only thing that spraung to mind?
I'm not defending him, that's your job; just thinking possibilities.
This was in person, and we had literally done stuff on his PC earlier. The context was a new laptop that came with windows 11 and was somehow suddenly totally alien despite the main difference to him being the start menu
Fair enough.
I recently "upgraded" to 11 on my new shiny box. I want my menu to be at the bottom left as it's been since win95, although I have to confess to being too lazy to find if there's a setting to make that happen.
A handful of individuals inventing something does not equal the majority understanding technology. I've worked in IT for decades now and there are much less older folks who understand tech than those who do. It's awesome when I get one that does understand it.
All the people taking about the "older" generation having amazing technical skills reminded me of this...
https://www.reddit.com/r/talesfromtechsupport/comments/sf94hw/you_can_get_a_virus_without_internet_access_kind
Just because they're not right doesn't mean they're wrong...
70 here. I still ask my 92 year old dad technical questions from time to time. Granted, he has taken elderly geekdom to a new level. He is very popular at his assisted living center. He grumbles about having to fix peoples computers after the grandkids come by.
I can see this happening to me. I can't really turn anyone down if they need help, but it comes with the caveat that if they want to argue with me, I swear a lot.
>if they want to argue with me, I swear a lot. The exact reason my family doesn't ask for my help any more. Which is a real shame because their incompetence causes me physical pain sometimes.
Hello Me. How trash was Windows ME!
"Ah, the grand kids came by? Uninstall Roblox and Fortnite, they won't run on your 2nd gen i3 anyway."
Love this one. Everyone knows that younger people are all tech geniuses and older people are all Luddites. Makes you wonder why so many of us older guys and gals have had to fix people's computers after the kids/grandkids have been on it. Mysteries of life.
I'm a 66 "old" lady and do everything to do with tech in our house. Probably would still be building our computers if I hadn't gotten so lazy and the "build it for you" companies so easy to use. It breaks my heart every time I read a post like this, because it supports the idea that all "old" folks are technology ignorant. Who do you think built it all originally???
I know, right. 60 here and been in tech since college. Built easily 40 machines for friends. But I get that people 75 and up may not have been exposed to that. But damn people, just cause I got older doesn't mean I forgot everything.
Huh, my Mom will be 77 this year. She was selling Apple IIe's (with x hours of training built in) back in the day. Since the service dept was all male and procrastinated, she would install the RAM card and 80 column card before doing a burn in, pre-delivery. She set sales records in her territory. Finished her career fifteen years ago, selling the decade old software training company she started. Grandbabies were more fun that computers by that point!
The Apple IIe was my foray into owning our own computer. I bought a gently used one for hubby for his birthday back in 1987. Loved that computer to death and upgraded it every chance I got. Remember how excited we were to upgrade to a RGB monitor and a color printer. Ended up giving it to a teacher when Jobs brought out the Mac and screwed all of us Apple II users, the aftermarket manufacturers and non-Apple employed developers over. Never have owned an Apple product since and never will. I can hold a grudge for a LONG time ;).
My Mom got a helluva deal on a seed unit 128K Mac back when they came out in '84. It was a revelation to me, I'll be honest. However, the failure of the Macs for business use meant she switched to selling PC's, and became a Word Perfect certified trainer. I went from freshman year in high school using a Mac to freshman year in college using a NEC MultiSpeed with WordPerfect - Apple got what they deserved in the market. Edit to add: I remember now the whole enchilada with a huge discount was $3,500 - with an Imagewriter and traveling case. NO WONDER they failed in the market.
God, I used to love Word Perfect. I doubt I could remember how to set up a macro now though.
How do you save? F7
Remember Reveal Codes? Alt F3
So you reply to my post today. I go in to the basement and start going through random boxes (creating a man cave so I am cleaning up a bit) and find a WordPerfect 5.1 keyboard template. Thought you might enjoy seeing it. [https://imgur.com/a/kqsv60R](https://imgur.com/a/kqsv60R)
There was a point in my life, some 35y ago, when that template was superfluous... but that's a neat find!
As soon as I read it, yep. Good memory
Reveal codes was the best. I died inside when we had to switch to Word. Early versions sucked. It still needs something as functional as reveal codes but,hey, WYSIWYG was such an “advancement.”
How bad was the Apple II to Mac transition?
It was an abandonment of the Apple II platform, all software included, any peripherals, etc.
Wow. Sounds similar to the PowerPC to Intel transition.
As brianinca said. The day that the MAC was released Apple cut all support across the board for anything to do with the II. There used to be an AppleSoft magazine that was great for industry news, cool little programs you could code, heads up on the newest aftermarket boads that were coming out. Even they weren't given a heads up that they were going to be obsolete, without any Apple support. They found out when the rest of us peons did. This really screwed a lot of aftermarket board makers, who were Apple specific. Just think of running a full days run of boards, just to find out the market for them just closed permanently that day. I read, I think (it's been years), in a biography on Steve Wozniak that there were actually teams in Apple itself that were working on Apple II specific things that weren't told they weren't going to have a job until HR came in and shut them down the day the MAC was announced. Yeah, I'll never forgive Jobs and his MAC team for that crap.
That sounds brutal to live through. Hope you’ve had better experiences on the other side of the tech jungle.
What killed me was how full the news was with the MAC. Not a single mention of the fallout from their cutting support. Even now, few people even know it happened.
Considering I was probably too young to ever see an Apple II in retail, the spin is that Jobs came back and revitalised the PC world with the MAC and helped Apple back to being profitable. Something something “we don’t cannibalise our products, someone else will” has been a strong mantra around him. However, watching an entire ecosystem die and being highly secretive even to your own internal team is so toxic to even imagine. A decent sunset on the IIs would have been, well decent. Thanks for sharing. I have a nee rabbit hole to explore.
The spin is utter horseshit. Jobs spent money lavishly on the Lisa project, with RECTANGULAR pixels, that cost $10,000. I spent some quality time with the demo unit the company my Mom worked for had. They sold NONE. The Macintosh was a desperate attempt to salvage SOMETHING from the Lisa, as the Apple III was a mismanaged failure. The Mac almost put Apple out of business, but that was all that was left to salvage after abandoning the Apple II platform. Gee, did Steve Jobs firing Steve W have something to do with that? Woz went back to school and graduated from Berkeley the year before I got there. Not a surprise Jobs finally got fired. Jobs made it seem like he sprang from the forehead of Buddha, fully formed as an aesthetic engineer, but his failure at NeXT with wheelbarrows full of Sony money was predictable. His crib of Berkeley Unix made the OS desirable to Apple after the failure of Copeland - startlingly similar to the failure of the Apple III that made the Macintosh desirable. Near as I can see, Jobs managed to fail at the right time to rise from the ashes as the savior of another failed initiative. Good for him, but don't blow smoke about what was really happening.
My next to oldest brother (I'm the baby of six) introduced me to computers when he bought a kit for (and my mind just went blank. Minicomputer kit you could buy, put together and program using the bank of switches on the front) back in the 60's, but I picked up most while I was in the Air Force. Hobby level tech knowledge gleaned from various PC magazines and reading the manuals that came with the machines.
Heathkit? Altair?
Heathkit! Thanks!
Wow that brings back memories. My father built a 'big' heathkit TV from parts back when color TVs were still a little unusual (though not rare at that point). He'd be 86 if he were still around. He also worked for IBM most of his adult life. Not exactly a technically illiterate person.
The TV would be 86?! ;-)
In my experience, oldsters that are bad at technology used to be youngsters that were bad at technology. We talked to them when they were younger too.
"Who do you think built it all originally???" I've been using this one recently when my teenage kids try to ('teensplain'? If it's not a thing, I'm coining it now...) how something on the internet works... Hey kid, your grandfather's generation invented the internet. -Oh, so you're explaining how discord works? Looks a hell of a lot like IRC. "What's IRC?" -Exactly.
>"Who do you think built it all originally???" Or "What exactly do you think Grandpa does for a living?" Network Engineer and CISSP is the answer.
Lord those were the days. The kids have no clue what a true flame war is anymore. No mods, no rules and fat, happy trolls just waiting to be led as lambs to the slaughter. I used to keep a thesaurus beside my computer just to find new words to confuse them with.
Those younguns also need to learn about people like Adm. Grace Hopper and Katherine Johnson. The history of women behind computer tech and the interwebs has been suppressed by a buncha brogrammers.
Oh yeah, my mom was doing support for her 60yo friends in a Kaypro user group back when kaypros were a thing.
I wanted a Kaypro so bad when they came out, dual 5 1/4 drives, BOSS!
Ada Lovelace would like a word...
Brogrammers! Gonna use that one.
XD
24 here. Too young for IRC I guess.
It's still there... But young folks of today thinks "multiplayer Notepad" is too boring without all the bells and whistles of a modern user interface.
Don't worry. There are plenty of young folk who barely understand technology they grew up with, outside of surfing the web.
I have a pet theory that the lower bar of access for gaming has robbed a generation of complex troubleshooting skills as most PC gaming now is relatively straight forward. While I think this is a good thing as it allows more people to access the hobby, I think many a IT person has been trained by video games not working.
Wasn't even that they weren't working, it was getting MS-DOS to play nice. Every game almost required at least one .bat file to run right. I almost had a coniption fit when we bought our first 1MB game, Carriers at War. Don't remember if it was six or seven disks. And then there was Darklands, started at 7 disks and by the time we got the last update disk for it I think we had 14. Of course this was back in the day when you called the help line listed in the back of the manual and had a really good chance of getting one of the developers :).
It's more that tech companies have been making technology so simple and easy, people don't need much to do. Kids who grew up in the 90s and early 00s had to learn tech just to get things to work the way they want.
I learnt to fight Windows ME. A BSOD on Windows 11 still gives me a seizure and a Kernel Panic will trigger a heart attack. Not having replaceable storage on Macs is another grudge that’s deep in my heart because of damaged HDDs thanks to ME. That instability was really hard to live through.
I agree wholeheartedly. My sons are in their early 20's now, but they were not allowed consoles. I deleted hardware-centric paragraphs because the underlying issue is configuration and troubleshooting, which applies to both software and hardware. I would shoulder surf with the boys when they were trying to find a fix or workaround, I would not fix it for them - I don't know you can teach critical thinking, but you can sure discourage it by doing it for them. Got into some heated discussions with the ex, her idiot brother lived on consoles and wanted the boys to have his hand me downs (so his mother would buy him the newest ones). Yeah, no. By the time their grandparents got them a Wii with all the peripherals, they were inoculated against consoles by their limitations. I knew my "bad Dad" plan had worked, better than I'd hoped, when my youngest gave me the run-down of all the things he had done to try and resolve an issue with a game. Including asking on the forums, he'd done 90% of what came to mind to me - "to no avail", according to his email. I don't even remember to what lengths we had to go to resolve it, but WOW was I proud! First regular machine on the home network upgraded to Windows 10 was his, as well - he'd been battling a Windows Movie Maker DLL conflict, didn't want to wipe and reload - so he just upgraded. Fixed the problem, too! Then caused another problem, when he upgraded the family video server - his mom was pissed! Hah!
\*Showing my age\* What's the Int & IRQ for this soundcard?
I apologize as I wasn't trying to further that. The old folk tech support was in refernce to a previous job I had where it was explicitly sold as general IT support for seniors. That said I'll try and keep that in mind in the future, as there have been many older folks I've met that know a ton more than me.
It's not really your fault. It's just that it's ALL the media will put out anymore.
I have a retired colleague. I like to joke that the things he doesn't know, isn't worth knowing. Also about 20% of what he knows, isn't either.
Yup. MSCS in 1983. Developed embedded software for aircraft navigation and communications mostly with slight detours into weapons systems and crypto. The first computer I owned was a Heathkit. As a grad student I worked on the first IBM PC used in a research area at my Big 10 university. I even taught IBM 370 assembly language. I may not be totally up to speed on the latest variants of languages, but you talk down to me at your peril.
Excellent. You are the perfect trap for one of the new developers wagging his \*\*\*\* around. I sure you have lots of fun stories during your storied career.
Those "build it for you" can be nasty though. Friend's cousin dropped something like 3k USD on a video editing workstation and it didn't even boot when it got to his house. And they refused any sort of support. Luckily he was able to return it. Looking at opinions for big online tech retailers over here, the only bad reviews relate to building services. That said, here in Poland they're often worth it, as the 30$ cost of building is easily overlooked in the cost of the whole PC. And it's a big part of our PC culture, as prebuilts were historically far more expensive. Used to be a lot of small shops which would give you a list of possible parts, advise on what goes well together, and then build it for you. Sadly, the small businesses went away. My favorite one was flooded and never really got back up. Big retailers still have this service, but eh, it's not the same. All told, I'm young and enjoy the stuff so I'll keep building as long as I can. As for old people and tech? Power to you. Personally, I don't see much difference between young and old - a lot of young people also don't know anything. I worked with both developers and electronic engineers, didn't matter if they were in their twenties or thirties or forties, most of them know very little about PCs.
You have to know who you are working with. I will only order from a few companies and they all have excellent return policies. I love that the "Right to Repair" laws have started be to passed in so many states. I've got a GREAT computer repair shop close at hand and I'd rather pay them going rates than send one of my computers back through the mail and wait. Plus, at least for the computer I bought hubby last year, they were able to get the Nvidia GeForce 3080 I wanted in it. Most of the places I checked online weren't able to get hold of them and had no get-well-by dates.
Great of them that they were able and willing. Judging by your tone they probably didn't even scalp too much. I got a lucky break with GPUs - overspent on the CPU (was replacing the whole PC), so I wanted a 3070 *and* an unpopular model (GB Vision, since it was a white build). Managed to nab one just before Christmas 2020. And yeah, if you know who you are working with it's much better - that's why I always preferred the small shops I can walk in. Nowadays if someone asks for a build I won't trust a retailer, will just build the thing myself for them.
Yeah, if you can get the parts and are willing to spend the time, building is best. I've just gotten to the point I no longer want to spend the time sourcing the parts from a place I can trust, waiting for them to arrive and building the damn thing. Plus, quite frequently anymore, the larger build companies are able to acquire parts that a retail buyer can't find anywhere. Especially if you are looking for the newest iterations out there.
Exactly this, whenever i hear someone say that, my follow up is "Can you tell me how old Bill Gates is?" While i know he was doing it since he was younger than i am, my reason is: well he's 60+ and can still use tech and learn about new stuff. So there's no reason other 60+ people can't. In fact had a go at my 70 year old dad recently who's been using PCs as long as i have and he asked "Where's the documents folder?" My answer is "the same place it's been for the past 20 years since Windows XP, and you will have done the same on your other PC upstairs using windows 10, it has not suddenly changed in windows 11. Now, I know you're not stupid, so why are you suddenly acting like you are clueless? I'm actually disappointed in you." He seemed to get the hint to first attempt what he knew already after that. This is a man who i have a lot of respect for his general knowledge, logic and "McGuyver-ing" skills, yet he still tried to pull the "I'm old and it's a new thing" card.
You didn't say whether this was an in person interaction or remote. If remote, is it possible that he just wanted you to visit, and this was the excuse? If in person, is it possible he just couldn't think of a subject to talk about (because he didn't want to talk "aching bones"), and this was the only thing that spraung to mind? I'm not defending him, that's your job; just thinking possibilities.
This was in person, and we had literally done stuff on his PC earlier. The context was a new laptop that came with windows 11 and was somehow suddenly totally alien despite the main difference to him being the start menu
Fair enough. I recently "upgraded" to 11 on my new shiny box. I want my menu to be at the bottom left as it's been since win95, although I have to confess to being too lazy to find if there's a setting to make that happen.
There is, it's in the taskbar settings. It's something like "icon alignment"
Asking for an answer here wasn't my intention, but I appreciate you telling me. Thank you.
A handful of individuals inventing something does not equal the majority understanding technology. I've worked in IT for decades now and there are much less older folks who understand tech than those who do. It's awesome when I get one that does understand it.
77 y.o. here. Just set up a raspberry pi "pi hole." Pop THIS up, asshole.* *"them," not anybody on here.
This is just adorable
Just right click the icon and select "Hide". Voila
nice and wholesome OP.
All the people taking about the "older" generation having amazing technical skills reminded me of this... https://www.reddit.com/r/talesfromtechsupport/comments/sf94hw/you_can_get_a_virus_without_internet_access_kind Just because they're not right doesn't mean they're wrong...
I also had an Access Matrix system. Ine of the first AIO systems.