MIL called the wife (from the landline) because her cell phone isn’t working. After work we drive over. She has an iPhone so I figured it was a charging issue. But when we got there it was a cheap android tracfone. She got it because the iPhone wouldn’t charge. The android phone took about 9 minutes to start up and then popup after popup after popup made it impossible to use. She had us take the phones home to see if I could fix them.

I cleaned the charging port in the iPhone and plugged it in. It works.

The android, i went through the apps and started deleting everything but the games. There ended up being 50+ file scanners all running at boot up. They would pop up as i was deleting a different scanner. I found a couple crypto miners on there, too. The phone got smoother and faster as I deleted more. I got the app count from 159 to 101.

Then we find out both phones are active so she’s paying for two cell phone plans.

The worst part is I fixed them. Now I’m tech support for life.

Sigh.

^^^

That last line, 100%

What phone number did she reach you on ?

Is that an 800# ?

my 80+ year old Mom in Law has had a basic trac phone for years, and used it as just a basic phone,

until that model died and the only one they (my wife and her sister) was a smart phone type trac phone,

so the wife taught her to text,

and she does,, relentlessly

quote:

Originally posted by lyman:
so the wife taught her to text,

and she does,, relentlessly

Just wait until the MIL discovers voice to text. Then she’s really going to take off

“Hey Siri”

I hadn’t mentioned that MIL has a large number of laptops that “quit working” So she buys another one. She does have one desktop computer that still works. That’s because I locked it down years ago so she can’t install 300 viruses on it.

She gets so mad when my wife tells her to stop installing games from sketchy sources.

Sounds like she needs a flip phone.

For computers, I've learned the Chromebook / Chromebox route was the way to go. Reduced my tech support hours to less than two hours per year compared to two hours per month.

Trust me on this one - Chromebooks are the way to go for the seniors in our lives. Of course, we still need to be seriously concerned with phishing attacks, but Chromebooks greatly help with functionality and malware.

When I switched my mom and her husband from old flip phones (no longer usable) to iPhones, they were both freaked out, but I introduced them only to the functions they had before and hid just about everything else. A couple of months later, I introduced them to texting.

I occasionally get a text message, including a photo of my mom's feet kicked up on the couch. She has no idea how she does that.

None of the emails my mom sends ever have a subject line.

At her lake house, I just gave her access to my YouTube TV account so she would not have to pay for cable. She's got it down to turning it on and tuning into one specific channel. Anything else raises her blood pressure.

They always have the iPhones plugged in unless they are in the car. I mean ALWAYS. It's some battery anxiety, I guess.

Love them. Fun times.

Sigh. My friend Pat is 83 (Frank's widow) and I visit at least weekly to check on her and take care of various errands.

Every. Single. Time. there's "something wrong" with her laptop. More than half the time it works fine for me.

She still uses Outlook for her mail, mainly because she has literally HUNDREDS, if not thousands, of emails that she will NOT delete. Might need to refer to them, you know. 50-100 in her inbox, most of which are junk mail.

Progress definition
Screwing with old people.

quote:

Originally posted by mark123:
The worst part is I fixed them. Now I’m tech support for life.

Sigh.

Tell her the Android phone is absolutely unsafe for her to use (from what you wrote that's not a lie) and to cancel the line. Head over to WalMart and grab an onn 5W Wireless Charging Pad, Black for her iPhone.

Problem solved.

quote:

Originally posted by PHPaul:
Sigh. My friend Pat is 83 (Frank's widow) and I visit at least weekly to check on her and take care of various errands.

...
She still uses Outlook for her mail, mainly because she has literally HUNDREDS, if not thousands, of emails that she will NOT delete.

There were a couple executives at work whose personal decision in this respect I could not override that did that. I warned them not to do that because Outlook's email database tended to fall over when it got big.

Sure enough: On a fairly regular basis I'd have to recover an Outlook database. And every time I did I warned them that, someday, I might not succeed. Naturally they disregarded that caution.

Until, once or twice, it finally happened.

quote:

Originally posted by PHPaul:

She still uses Outlook for her mail, mainly because she has literally HUNDREDS, if not thousands, of emails that she will NOT delete. Might need to refer to them, you know. 50-100 in her inbox, most of which are junk mail.

In my case it’s the wife.

I love her dearly, but she drives me crazy with her computer.

A couple of weeks ago, she’s complaining that her laptop is “broken”. I take a look and she has over 10,000 unread emails. Most are from some “health” sites she’s given her email address to and they spam relentlessly.

Next, I check her browser. She has multiple Chrome pages open, with over 100 tabs open between them. She says she can’t close them or she’ll “lose” the information. She can’t grasp the concept of bookmarking sites.