Internet & Technology

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Remember the Information Technology Department at work?  Seniors are now their own IT departments.  This does not mean they are wizards, but they have 'networks' of friends, who help them get things going.  As time goes by, they get more and more adept.

Grandfathers and Grandmothers are getting computerized.  Today gave us a good example of this.

A retired couple now has 3 very active computers in their home.  One is an old tower, the second is a laptop and the third is a notebook.  They have a wireless hub and think nothing of it.

Their most recent acquisition arrived today.  It was a tidy small notebook manufactured by msi as shown above. It's smaller than a normal Laptop, so the woman of the house thought it would be fun to take on their trips to see their children.

She does a lot of work with genealogy and is adept at searching the net for things.  They are avid movie watchers so the downloadable movie is their cup of tea.

The notebook they bought was inexpensive and very powerful.  It has 250 gigabytes of disk storage and 1 gigabyte of real memory.  It has a couple of USB ports, an auxiliary display port in case you want to hook in a much larger screen.  It has speaker ports, a good keyboard a microphone and camera.

How did the setup go?

We did not bother to read the big sheet with 8 languages on it and just started like this:

1. Installed the battery, which was easy.

2. Plugged the notebook in and hit the On Button icon.

3. Told the system what language we felt comfortable with and what time zone we were in at present.

4. Waited for the system to configure itself and install the customary Microsoft Works software.

5. Waited for the automatic reboot and had a cup of tea.

6. When the system came up it was the new System 7.  We went to the Control Panel and asked the system to look around for the wireless hub, which it found.

7. We then set up Internet Explorer 8 with its customary home page, which in this case was www.saugeentimes.com

8. Hitting mail on the IE toolbar took us to the inbox of their mail that they use, which is MSN and Hotmail.  Everything worked.

Incidentally their internet wireless service from their hub was lightning fast.  We watched MPP Carol Mitchell's announcement about Bruce Power as it streamed onto the screen

It must be tough today to be an IT director.  It's hard to tell people no for any reason.  They will counter:   Well, my parents have this installed and it works fine.  Why can't I have it at work?

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Thursday, November 25, 2010