How tech illiterate are your parents? Any stories?

My mom learned BASIC in high school in the 80s. She can manage to use a computer well enough, she even used Linux Mint in a shitty netbook for some time. Dad managed it a bit better, he can do basic troubleshooting by himself and built his own computer at some point in the early 00s.

My Dad has his phone number taped to the back of his iphone 4s

Also his phone BT glitches occasionally. I have been telling him for over a decade to do a "hard reset" by holding the power and home buttons for 3 seconds. This is totally beyond him and he will drive over to my place and get me to do it.

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Mother's mid-high tech literate. Not IT-levels but she can google-fu her way through a driver issue and minor hardware fix. Could probably work her way through a SQL database.

Father likes to pretend he's tech-illiterate so that nobody gives him any tech responsibilities, but really he's mostly just fat-fingered, short-tempered, and not keen on solving things for himself.

my mother refused to use smartphones until 3 years ago. her friends created a whatsapp group and she gave in.
with many hurdles, I made her learn to use my 12 year old laptop too, with ubuntu.
she can't use a mouse and loves using touchpad.

girlfriend's mother cannot use a phone. she can answer a phone but cannot call back.

boomers are really strange about tech.

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my mom calls her samsung phone an iphone and the google maps GPS voice "siri"

>girlfriend's mother cannot use a phone. she can answer a phone but cannot call back.
Nani?

>opens every app on phone
>leaves them open in the background
why do boomers always do this?

I can't make my mother to read what pop-ups on her screen says. She just ask what is it every time even though it's written right on the screen.
Father accidentally pushes bottom left number key on an Android keyboard and can't get back to the normal one

Mom is can barely do anything by herself.

Dad used to be a programmer but still have problem with more recent stuff.

so, braindead illiterates

My boomer grandmother (she had my mother when she was 18) didn’t know how to close google chrome tabs until I showed her.

I had to explain my mother how to use the home button of the iPad to return to the home menu.

How freaking old are all your parents? Mine are 48/50 (mom and dad), meaning they were around 25 when desktop computing exploded (Win95 and all that).

>inb4 underage

I'm 24.

75

don't forget:
>100+ notifications on the top bar
>leaves bluetooth, wifi, gps, and every battery draining option on
>every app littered on the homescreen with no folders or attention to detail

>Any stories?

>initialize the hard drive?
>i'd love to put my initials on it

boomers mate. they defy all the logic I have.
let me add about my mother. she couldn't understand the concept of tabs in browsers. every time she wanted read her newpapers online, she was closing firefox completely and then opening it again to read a different paper. I showed her a couple of times, she couldn't grasp it for 2 days.

>turn mobile data, location and bluetooth off
>close every background app
>clear all notifications
>week later it's all back
i'm not sure if my grandma has dementia or she's just really stupid

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66.

How is that possible if she knows the absolute basics of windows? Surely the X in the corner of every tab would be a dead giveaway to anybody?

nope, they do not understand what those symbols mean. they memorize which button do what.

>dad just had surgery and was recovering in the hospital
>had some voice messages and asked me to play them
>go to his voicemail app
>show him the message
>he starts freaking out because that isn't how he checks his voicemail. He goes through call app and types in his code
>begins yelling that I broke his phone
>heart rate spikes, temperature spikes, monitors all beeping
>like 5 nurses rush in because it was technically a state of emergency according to his readings

This tale was on an android phone, she somehow understands the basics of computer hardware and software, as she needs something good for running a DJ program for her Line Dancing class

>hey can you show me how to do this?
>NO THATS NOT HOW YOU DO IT
everytime

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My dad is super technically adept and was all in crypto like 3 or 4 years ago. My mom is a complete retard who struggles to check her email. It was fine when they were still together, but now I have my dad trying to get me to help with various online moneymaking schemes and my mom calling me every other day because her email "just stopped working" (long story short, it never actually "just stops working")

That sounds infuriating. My parents aren't particularly good with computers, more-so my Mum, but at least when they ask for my advice they just listen and do what I tell them to with no stupid arguments.

I've got plenty:
- my mom was convinced WiFi is linked to Alzheimer's and switched the WiFi off every night.
- my dad ***HAD*** chrome installed on his work laptop but adamantly used IE
- at one point one of them asked me to buy an ethernet cable in case they bought the wrong one
- And an HDMI cable
Thank the fucking lord I live in a different country now

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Fake, gay, stale pasta. Good thing it's not getting any outraged replies anymore.

Tell your mother that cell phones, radios and microwaves emit the same exact alzheimer waves as wifi.

My dad thinks js image sliders are voodoo magic

My mother is fine with me telling her how to something but she hates hearing that there's more than one way to do something.
She doesn't care what the procedure is, though; she'll just write it down step-by-step and repeat whatever it is. Using the mouse, using keyboard shorcuts, typing in commands, is all the same to her. So I just teach her keyboard shortcuts as if it were the only way to do anything.

>Install Windows 10 Pro on grandads laptop, activate it with vendors key
>doesn't have Word, though, and Libre messes his documents
>he brings it into his office so they install Word on it
>glance at his laptop, see "Windows is not activated"
>wtf.tiff
>check the activation
>it has some shitty third party key loaded that windows doesn't recognize
>have to change it to the previous key and reactivate it

I don't blame him, but what were IT guys doing to fuck this up? It quite disgusts me that they half-assed their job and left him with this problem and he didn't complain to them first or at least to me.
Also had to tell him to charge his phone more frequently when he went for 4 days without charging and his phone had 6% left.

My boomer dad has a PhD in a field of mathematics and has been using computers since the late 80's but is unbelievably tech illiterate to this day.

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>How tech illiterate are your parents?
Not enough to bother me in any meaningful capacity
>Any stories?
I set up my mother's iPad and get her a new one every few generations or so. She likes to browse news through the apps.

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Damn, why are there so many old people on 4channel now?

I have two actual boomer (low-mid sixties) parents.
>Dad's laptop with win10 is crazy fucked and slow.
>One day, images on Autotrader.com aren't loading properly.
>I stop by at home about a week after the problem has arisen.
>He explains the problem.
>I ask if they have researched the problem on google.
>They did. They tell me that the "kashay" needs to be cleared.
>Ask them if they cleared the cache.
>"No"
>I clear it in 10 seconds without putting down my burrito.
>Problem solved.
My dad went a whole week frustrated and angry that autotrader wasn't working lol.

My mom doesn't understand tabs. I've explained her a million times that you can open up multiple tabs at once and switch between tabs. Every time she gets mad ans says YEAH I UNDERSTAND. Then when I'm gone she opens up a new Chrome window for each website again.

I bought my mother a Surface Go for her birthday this last January for her job. She's a speech pathologist so she deals with a lot of case loads with her students she counsels, so she just needed a shitty little "lap top" to get the job done. Works great for running Word and Outlook. I recently spilled tea all over my own laptops keyboard so it's been in the shop, I've had to basically live at my uni's campus to complete my assignments on their computers. My mom keeps offering for me to just use her Surface Go to do my assignments, I keep tellin' her it cant run the programs I need (or even install them for that matter), such as Visual Studio or my uni's Linux server. She knew going into this that the Go has a very limited amount of programs it can install/run but she keeps forgetting that and I have to remind her daily why I cant use the Go. Bless her heart shes only trying to help

>his mom didn't fall for the tablet meme
she sounds pretty based

Can't you just upgrade it from 10S to the regular full 10?

I wouldn't upgrade it just because I need to use it while my own laptops in the shop, not worth it. Windows 10S works just fine for my mom. Plus the memory and storage on a Go is so minuscule it would have trouble running full Windows 10. Also, you cant go back to Window 10S once you've upgraded.

Yeah she thinks tablets are stupid. I gave her a T420.

My dad has had a hard time comprehending browser tabs as well. I've always believed that it stemmed from him being used to IE6 (and older IEs before that) to do anything web related for a long time since he was using it from around late 90's to early 2010's.

Extremely. Funny thing is, they're both extreme narcissists and refuse to ask for help when things are totally fucked because they hate the idea that I know more about something than they do. My mom is always getting her card info stolen and shit, and my dad is perpetually needing to take his computer into places like "the geek squad" and get it "fixed".

my mom was a programmer in the 80s. now she is on the phone with comcast doing speed tests on her fire tablet

My dad used to do computer repair work but he's not really more knowledgeable than your average /pcbg/ poster. My mother has been using computers daily for 30 years and she still hasn't figured out the basics.

My dad calls every smartphone an iphone and every tablet an ipad.

My dad delete his texts after reading them «to save space». Every time I teach him something, he doesn't write it down and forget it in less than two days.

Mom can do basic things like using words, writing emails... But is otherwise really terrible.

Both hide behind the fact that «they were not born with as much as technology, so it's normal I we take absurdly long to understand basic things»

That's not bad. People say Kleenex and Bandaid as generic terms too. Marketing works.

Mine are pretty literate. They're retired now, but they both extensively used computers for work, and had a PC in the home at a time when it wasn't terribly common. My dad is also a bit of a hifi enthusiast, but not the insane audiophile kind. Most of the tech difficulty they do have is down to technology evolving a little bit quicker than they can keep up with.

It really sounds like she has a learning disability or something.

My dad's a web developer

My mom is reasonably tech savvy. At least she knows how to not get viruses.

Though they may not be as technically literate as myself I respect them for the upbringing they gave me

My father was a pioneer of CAD/CAM and cloud software and sat on the board or was VP/President of multiple large tech companies from the 80s-2010s...my mother can barely use email successfully and constantly needs help with her cell phone.

that's nice user.

I do this...

Who cares? The phone's resource management sees to it that "open" apps in the background aren't slowing things down or using too much memory.

Because you are here forever (even if it moves)

Because Jow Forums(nel) has been around for a long time and people who were young when it started are still here.

Parents are quite tech literate
Grandma's the kind of person that would accidentally turn her phone brightness down to 0, and think her phone screen's broken

I was here since I was 19, I'm now 30.

Both pretty illiterate

Both can use email and pay bills.
I had to multiple times come over to show my mom why "her tv didn't have signal"
>i hooked her laptop through hdmi to the tv
Pressed the source button once and it started to display the pc again

Ok Jow Forums so I'm collecting money for my new pc which I want to put together myself but my mom thinks it's funny since I'm so young and she thinks I'm gonna break something. Well, what if my dad put it together? She thinks he in no way can put it together even when I went to his house I saw him building his pc and he managed to do it. Well, my friends brother knows how to build pcs, he built his and he's gonna build one for my friend so maybe he could build one for me too. Mom doesn't beileve that either. I'm about to fucking break. PC buidling has become easier and easier over the years so even a fucking 9 year old can do it, but no, she thinks you have to fucking study 5 years to learn how to build pcs like fuck off woman maybe for you, yes, because the only machine you know how to operate is an oven. So how do I show her how easy it actually is to build a pc Jow Forums?

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It took me a very long time to convince my mom Facebook isn't the whole internet

imagine actually believing this shit

Classic

I talked my mother through her first post on Jow Forums a month ago. It took an hour to talk her through it.

>So how do I show her how easy it actually is to build a pc Jow Forums?
Build a PC in front of her.

What, you actually believe that apps are always 100% active in the background?

>My dad is also a bit of a hifi enthusiast, but not the insane audiophile kind.

There's more than one kind?

>first time running dual monitors ages ago
>show my parents the mouse moving from one monitor to the other
>they look at me like I performed some kind of black magic ritual

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Didn't vox or some shit make a video about this a while back? Show her that vid

My mom double clicks everything and uses the scroll bar arrows. Doing literally anything beyond scrolling down Facebook and checking her emails is not possible for her. My Dad has a folder on the desktop called "sites" with shortcuts to his motorcycle forums. He does not understand tabs or bookmarks, and doesn't even really know what a web browser is. He just wants to open the page and already be logged in, because he doesn't remember a single fucking password. Remembering their passwords is my job.

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Of course. Not everyone who likes good quality sound is a crazy fuckwit who thinks they need solid gold speaker cables and all that other stupid shit.

kek I can relate. I've also been asked why I have two computers.

My dad's smart enough to hold rather in depth conversations with, he can go off context clues and get a general idea of what I'm talking about most of the time. My mom's clueless but could easily hit 100wpm before she lost her hand.

Surface Go only came out this summer.

My mom and sister asked me to perform tech support on their vacuum. It wasn't plugged in.

He probably only has ever owned shitty sub $100 phones.

My dad who used to work in IT and is now retired can't even get the DNS working on consumer routers correctly
I have to constantly drive over to fix the network only to have it get broken again because "he used to work in IT, and he knows what he is doing"
its not his fault but it scares me that this is what awaits us in old age
My mom is standard levels of completely retarded with anything to do with computers.

Dad can manage his way through emails, pdfs, word, google, etc. and is decent enough to pass as your average normie nowadays. My mother had no clue whatsoever of anything until I gave her an old laptop because she was bored one night. It took great efforts, as she had troubles even getting it on but has surpassed my expectations every time since them. I only teach her the concept as to why the stuff happens and she makes her way through with that (after asking over and over for a few times), actually uses bookmarks, knows to not go overboard with the quality of videos and is seen often just spending time googling stuff for fun so I'm optimistic that she's ready to get introduced to videogames, particularly Zelda ones given she recognizes the "gay elf" as Link and actually spent 40 mins once on BoTW just going around town and enjoying the scenery.
So with that experience I will say as long as the people are slightly interested and you're clear, brief and simple on your explanations without treating them like retards they can go very far.

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>son, do you remember my password?

user, she just wants your companie

I have flashed stock android on both their devices as well as the home tablet, they are familiar with the ancient 'turning it off and on again' principle, only questions I get is of some monthly NAS protocol error

They are completely oblivious to modern snooping/datamining but did freak out when some services/apps suddenly had their phone numbers so.. 10% woke

Why are stupid nigger old people so resistant to learning anything new?

Because they are spoiled boomers who have had everything in life handed to them. Everytime they had a problem they just yell kick and scream until the problem goes away or their attention gets diverted to literally anything else.

People just naturally get more and more set in their ways and less willing/able to learn new things as they age. Some to a greater degree than others, but it happens to everyone. One day it'll be your turn.

>Mom uses Apple products
>She went to classes to learn how to use a MacBook
>Still needs to schedule appointments with Apple to get help backing up MacBook's Time Machine because she doesn't understand jack shit
>Was crying to me for help every other day for help and when I finally started refusing, she went crying to my friends for help when they stopped by
>she texted my friend who worked for a phone company every day once she got his number
>Thought she could be VIP for every new fucking iPhone because she thought said friend could get in front of everyone else as an employee.
>He stopped texting her after he tried to explain to her that wasn't the case, then she came crying to me about it.

>Mom has own business
>Still takes down orders with credit cards using pen and paper when at conventions
>Won't use a mobile credit card reader because she's too much of an idiot to understand it
>Computers for her business all auto updated to Windows 10
>All the programs used to manage business went to shit because of it.
>Meanwhile Dad is 10 years older than her, uses a Blackberry running Android and chromebook and runs laps around her regarding his utilization of technology.

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My mom(black female) is very tech literate. No meme. She likes to play games and her favorite is the custom user created Zelda games on the PC.

Father is less tech literate but knows his way arouns Office software.