We had run into each other a few weeks back at a Chamber of Commerce sponsored event where I happened to be running the Entertainment Tent (you can't call it a beer tent anymore) and he was volunteering for the Chamber. I never pass up an opportunity to network. Especially when there is live music and a micro brew or two involved. We happened on a conversation about the latest technology, iPhones, iPods, texting systems, and the Mac vs PC debate. You see even in his business he just doesn't see many service calls for Mac users. The majority of his business is PC and small network related. He mentioned his business has been hit or miss like most small businesses in this volatile economic period we are all struggling through. He is currently in a period of being quite busy and was relaying how many hours he had been working. I am always trying to help those that are in my networking circle so I offered to help out if he got too busy or ran into something Mac based that he might need help with. Which leads us back to the Facebook IM. He had a client with a critical need to have an iTouch configured to a new PC laptop and needed several applications downloaded to it and he had not had the opportunity to set one up before. I agreed to take the job for him as long as all the money went through his office (I always feel strange taking money from someone else's clients).
I decided that this would be a good opportunity for my 17 year-old daughter Danielle to "get her feet wet" in on-site service at a client's home. I would not usually do this but I happened to know the client from the same BNI group. My daughter as you can guess from her age is fluent in anything "i" related. iPods, iPhones etc. Upon arrival and after the usual networking banter we settled into the task at hand, finding out why they could not get the iTouch to connect to the new laptop. I let my daughter do the initial "driving", as I like to call it, as she is the expert in these devices. She quickly realized this would not be a quick fix. The client's iTunes account would not recognize the iTouch at all, no matter what she tried. We were able to answer lots of questions for the client while she was trying different things. The client is in her early to mid 60's but is very tech savvy for her age but this is completely new territory for her. Mobile technology is a basic cell phone in her world up to now. We even reminisced about the old days of DOS for a short while, totally confusing my daughter with the concept of an operating system that was command based with no GUI (graphical user interface). She just could not fathom using a computer without a mouse or touchpad to point and click.
I decided it was my turn to "drive" to see what the problem was while my daughter did some basic setups on the iTouch with the client. I quickly realized there were several issues to be addressed. First and foremost were 22 different updates to the operating system alone. The client thought that since the laptop had just been purchased two days before and that it was a Windows Vista Premium OS and a 64 bit processor that it would not need to be updated out of the box. This is an assumption made by many knowledgeable users. What people don't realize is that technology today is moving and changing at such a break-neck speed that even a brand new top-of-the-line computer is already falling behind the times right off the shelf. Can you imagine buying a brand new car off the dealer's lot and by the time you get it home in your driveway it already needs an oil change, muffler, and new tires? That is the closest analogy I can give you to a new computer that fresh out of the box needs 22 OS/Browser updates, 3 driver updates, and 4 hardware updates.
This did give me a chance to give my usual "lecture", as my daughter calls it, on automatic updates, virus protection, and backups. The Trifecta of any good computer maintenance program. If you want to keep up with the speed of technology today, you have to learn to automate these three important functions or you are just asking for trouble. I would give you my favorites for these functions but there are so many free aps out there that work so well and everyone seems to have their personal favorites anyway. Just make sure you are doing all three and test your backups to be absolutely certain you can restore your data from the backup file. It won't do you any good to have backed up all your files if you can't restore from it. I also showed her the proper use of "system restore". Always defragment, then set the restore point (name it for example "Before Widget Install"), then install any new software, and then create another restore point (name it "After Widget Install). that way no matter what you run into you will have a before and after setup at your disposal. Set up a scheduled restore point so that you never lose more than a weeks worth of files in case something goes wrong, and it will sooner or later.
There were so many updates I set it to continue to run them and made an appointment to come back to do the final setup at a later date. Maybe we can talk about how many 5 1/4 in floppies it would take to hold the same amount of files as her 16 GB iTouch will when we are finished. The speed of technology makes for some interesting conversation at the very least.
