Contact with the Outlaws!

I have spent a decent amount of time this weekend with the Outlaws setting up the Mother-in-law’s new laptop along with a wireless router for her so she can keep in touch when we leave for Moscow.

After a bit of looking around for options I installed windows live essentials for her and setting her up with a Live account as she didn’t have an email address outside of work. So she now has an email address and the means to access it on the local machine, the interface for the Windows Live Mail client is very clean and simple, perfect for her really at this stage.

I installed Skype and set her up with an account and sorted out the webcam for her on there.  For when she has issues I made the laptop a LogMeIn client on my account so I could remotely connect. Security-wise I had already installed Avasy free antivirus and Spybot search and Destroy anti-spyware free edition. I alsoinstalled Firefox and made it the default web browser, which she accepted without question.

I showed her how to use the few simple things she need to use initially, and she picked things up pretty quickly and was genuinely excited by it all, especially the simple things like the wireless internet connection that I just take for granted.

She was interested in looking at Facebook as a lot of her family are on there, so the wife set all that up for her and showed her out to use it and added a few friends for her.

I was initially going to have her use the Windows Live Photo Gallery to public to an online gallery, but after taking a look at Flickr she wanted to use that instead, so now I just have that to set up for her, and install the uploader for her.

I am pretty confident she will pick things up pretty quickly, and I was surprised how easy it was to explain the basics in a way she understood and could follow, it has been a while since I worked in support so I thought it might be a lot harder to get her to understand.  Maybe there could be some work in this area in Moscow. Anybody need a hand?

I am pretty sure that the wife is going to be a lot happier knowing her Mum has a few new options to keep in touch with us whilst we are away.

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This entry was posted on Sunday, February 8th, 2009 at 8:24 pm. It is filed under Blog, Life, Technology and tagged with Family, Moscow, Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.