One Day Turnaround

My mother made a decision to get a new laptop.   I’m not sure I remember when she got a laptop last.   I know she got one in 2001 when she retired, but I think she may have been working with my father’s old laptops ever since then.   But regardless of the timeframe, her current laptop was old and had some issues that weren’t easily solvable and a new laptop sounded like a good plan.

And this is where the major decision was: Mac or Windows machine?   I went Mac in 2013 and you couldn’t pay me to go back to Windows.   The little bit of tech support I do with my parents and other friends is enough of a taste to be frustrated with some of the complexity and confusion that lies with Windows-based operating systems and the huge varieties of hardware the operating system has to support.

So today my mother and I went to the Apple store, waited in one of their lines to get in line to wait to be helped just so we could buy something.   But we got the laptop and a mouse and headed home.   My mother went back to her house and I started working on setting up her…strike that, I couldn’t set up her machine because there was child-based interference.

I did make it to the laptop a bit later and got Office, the remote access software, a bunch of things configured, favorites/bookmarks moved over, lots of things logged in and I was suddenly done.   It was a few phone calls with my mother and we had it covered.   It was easy.   All I had to do was go to her house and move her files over after getting her on their network.

I didn’t make it out of the house until later but it was before dark, which I count as a win.   There were network issues with a printer and then ten minutes moving files and we were done, short some questions and my discussion about how Mac is different and how it should be a LOT easier because there’s just not as much stuff to contend with.  

Tonight I left and my mother had already send me two emails.   Tomorrow I’ll see what questions she has.   She’s doing great with no Mac experience.   I hope she ends up liking her Mac as much as I do mine.

The Big Boy Update:  My son is playing some mod on Minecraft while I write this blog post.   I can barely write because he keeps interrupting me to tell me about the jump block or the quicksand block you can hide using the camouflage block.   I keep having to, “look Mom”.  He’s pretty good at this game/exploration environment

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  My daughter told me for no apparent reason tonight as we sat at the bar and had dinner together, “the worst part about cats is you have to clean the litter box.”  She asked me how litter boxes worked and was quite confused about how liquids turned to solids and could be scooped.