Just tested the opinion of the 'General Public'

[whs]

Wolfgang,
I didn't know you meet my wife.

Jim

I know what you are talking about. My wife sits in all my classes because she helps me with the setup. And there she is picking up bits and pieces. Maybe you should take up teaching.

I use to teach a Unix class when I was with ATT in the late 80's to my fellow employees. Learned a lot myself but forgot most of it now.

Jim

Was that when Armstrong was the CEO of ATT. He was my boss once in his previous job.

 

[Phone Man]

I know what you are talking about. My wife sits in all my classes because she helps me with the setup. And there she is picking up bits and pieces. Maybe you should take up teaching.

I use to teach a Unix class when I was with ATT in the late 80's to my fellow employees. Learned a lot myself but forgot most of it now.

Jim

Was that when Armstrong was the CEO of ATT. He was my boss once in his previous job.

I moved from my local Bell to ATT after the big split in 1984. I remember him but don't remember the time frame. I moved over to NCR in 1990 when ATT bought them out. Left NCR in 2000 and finished my 40 year career with Verizon Wireless.

Jim

 

[whs]

Looks like you are a real live Phone Man.

 

[sandman]

Ya I have a friend of my wifes that is pretty well off and buys a imac and a ipad and gets the 1 year of classes so one day i ask her what browser is she using and she reply' s with whats a browser. She is learning a little but if she doesn't use it every day or right it down she forgets the procedure. She is trying to learn i siad if i lived closer I would help her but we are hours away.

 

[SIW2]

Hi WHS,

I am not surprised.

There are a large group of people who have simple computer needs.

They only need to access a handful of shortcuts to do what they want.

Those who can do everything they need from a cheapo mobile phone for example.

Metro is just fine for them .

Nobody is denying that.



Those of us who want to do rather more complicated ( geeky if you like ) things - Metro is a massive hindrance.

That is what the entire debate is about.

Your seniors club results are entirely consistent with that.

Today I gave the last class of an eight week Windows 7 class in my computer club. During the last hour of the class I presented Windows 8 as kind of an outlook. The reaction was interesting. Not a single person disliked Windows 8 at this point. The general consensus was that it is probably easier to use than Windows 7.

Remind you, those are senior citizens who are no geeks by any imagination. They thought it was interesting and refreshing. None of these people run a business on their system. So here may be the difference.

I had to do overtime because several people asked me to copy the .iso to their external disks so that they did not have to download it for 3 hours.

Looks like Windows 8 may do better than we think. All it needs is a bit of basic education.

 

[whs]

But the seniors are typical for 80% of the user population. I would venture to get those people going with a 1 hour instruction.

1. Cleanup the start menu - throw out what you are not using
2. Make shortcuts of your folders
3. Make logical groups of the start tiles and name the groups
4. What does right click do for me
5. Install the programs I use
6. Learn how to deal with All Apps

From here, they never need to go to the desktop. For the most adventures, I would tell them how to get to Control Panel via Win+X. But most of these people do not know what to do with it in Win7 either.

And for us geeks, it should be no problem at all to do what we want. I have not yet found anything I could not do. Yes, it is sometimes different to do things, but not necessarily worse.