First computer

I spent Saturday morning at the home of a friend from work. She recently purchased their first computer and it scares her something fierce. She has two teen boys 14 and 16 who of course have already found my space and IM's but other than that none of them have any experience at all.

As I started with the basics of turning it on and off properly and installed all the prerequisite firewalls, virus protection, adaware, spybot etc... I tried to explain the vaugaries of safety on the web and warned the boys that I was also installing parental controls and a tracker so they needed to make sure they were not going anywhere their mom would not approve of. The 16 year old looked at the 14 year old and said "that means no porn you pervert" I told them it meant more than that. It also meant they would need to watch their language and steer clear of any offensive materials.

I walked them through the process of safely downloading Ipod tunes with their mothers permission and explained the system tools for disc cleanup, defrag and system restore. The 16 year old sat quietly next to me taking notes and asking questions while the 14 year old ran about whooping and hollering.

12 hours later the younger boy managed to put something onto Myspace that he shouldn't and wanted it gone. Not understanding the process because he wasn't listening, he took the older boys notes and did a system restore. Of course that didn't fix the My Space problem so he started randomly deleting things on the computer...goodbye Quickbooks, goodbye modem drivers... you get the idea.

I was able to walk the older boy through restoring the files from the trash and reversing the system restore over the phone. He's a bright kid and really wants to learn so I am enjoying it.

Now I just need to convince the Mother to learn more so she will not panic when he practices the things I show him.