...has to take much strain. Being a male of his generation, he never has done anything, at least when it turns out wrong, and all you ever get when asking: "Dad, what did you do before it stopped working?" is an innocent: "Me? Nothing!". I am sure you know how it is.
Well, you cannot refuse to fix your parents computers. So I decided to get something good out of this and write down what we, living on the other side of the screen most of our time, can learn from him.
Today he told me that his Thunderbird asked him for an update installation some days ago and that since then his Thunderbird only talks english to him (instead of german). "No big deal", I thought and told him to install the latest version again, thinking that there might have been some glitch in the localization.
No effect.
Ok, sacrificing a black lamb on the altars of Tim and Roy, burning some IANA registration forms for Jon, I went to mozilla and copied the download link for the german version into a mail and sent it to my dad.
"I did it, but it is still english."
I stayed calm, promised to have a look next time I come over and wondered silently what could possibly have gone wrong there.
And in the evening I talked to him again regarding something else and he said:
"Oh, by the way, I discovered that you have to actually run the programs when you have installed them!"
"What do you mean by running the programs?"
"I downloaded them as you said and moved them into the Program Files Folder. But it only changed when I double clicked them afterwards..."
I realized that he had, without knowing it, done it the OS X way. He just dragged the downloaded .EXE into the "Application" folder and expected the OS to take care of the rest.
So, I explained that he was right in a way and that Apple is working like this, but under Windows the downloaded programs are programs that install the programs that you want to download. Ok?
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