It’s been almost two years since I switched to the Macintosh platform and I’m glad I did it. But the fact is that the rest of my family (save my brother) has still been on Windows. Well, the family Dell bought the farm and they’ll be switching. I think that my parent’s experiences will be quite different from mine, so I thought I’d document this event.
So first a quick intro. The family computer sits in the kitchen and is used by EVERYONE in the house. We all know how to use it, my parents doing e-mail, web browsing, Office, and a few games. Now I should mention that my parents are somewhat comfortable using the computer, but only for the activities they know how to do. They really haven’t struck out on their own (which I can’t blame them for). If anything goes wrong, or they don’t know how to do it, they will ask me (after a short while). They are both quite intelligent (both have PhDs) but like many people want the computer to “just work”.
Now as their computer problems go, they can generally be ascribed to three categories. The first is not knowing how to do something that they haven’t done before (or have rarely done). The second is due to the weirdness that is AOL (it’s amazing how often it crashes and grabs 100% of the CPU). The third is computer problems that are due to Windows (random stuff stopping working, lockups, etc). The family laptop has been wiped and re-done before, there is no spyware or viruses on there (right now). But no Windows computer seems to like to behave well forever.
So here is what will be going on. Tomorrow, I’ll find out if there are new Macs announced. If there are, we will buy a newly announced iMac. If the iMac line is unchanged, we will buy an iMac from a local store. Along with the platform switch, I will need to get them off AOL for e-mail and such, along with getting some of their other stuff to work and putting office on the machine. I’m also going to try to get them to use separate users.
Their recent Mac experience is limited to trying mine for part of a day. That will change quickly. The grand experiment begins tomorrow.
