Indra’s Drishtikona (Viewpoint)

Dad may be offline for a few days..:-(

Posted : December 31, 2004 at 2:57 am [IST]

[on behalf of my Dad]

What started out as an innocuous ISP issue seems to have snowballed into a much bigger problem for my Dad. It seems spywares have found a haven in his computer. Also, from whatever I can understand, it seems his computer might be infected with virus(es) as well.

Frankly, back in October of 2003 when I was visiting my parents, I made three H-U-G-E blunders:

• Bought him a Windows XP without ensuring that the default 60-day free Norton Anti-Virus subscription got upgraded to a paid yearly one.
• Got him hooked on Internet Explorer instead of Mozilla Firefox. IE is a high maintenance browser software. Most of us don’t realize it because either we’re pretty geeky ourselves or someone else (example: IT Support staff at work) does “all” the dirty work for us
• Got him hooked on Microsft Outlook as an Email client despite the availability of Mozilla Thunderbird.

Here’s the bad news:

My Dad might be offline for some time, since we all know how “customer service” friendly our society back in India is.

Here’s the good news:

If he can get his computer re-imaged with Windows XP (and some of the default softwares that came with the initial purchase of HP), it will give me an opportunity to “right” my “wrongs” and give my dad a fresh start with much more knowhow about computers than he first had back in Oct. 2003

Needless to say, my dad is pretty upset about all this. After all, he had these elaborate ideas cooked up about his upcoming posts, especially in the context of New Year and the Tsunami that struck South East Asia. Stealing Arnold Schwarzenegger’s lingo, I am sure my dad (or some MTV generation version of him) would luv to say this to you all:

“I will be back”

Thought you folks would like to know. And thanks for being loyal readers. You’ve no idea how much your inputs mean to him. Trust me. If only you could ask my Maa

- Indra

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