I previously wrote about how my Mother-in-law was getting her first ever experience with computers. We are giving her a hand-me-down laptop, a new printer and DSL service with WiFi for Christmas 2008. Well, the moment of truth came yesterday when she opened the laptop’s lid and turned it on for the first time. Although she took a couple of brief computer classes a couple months ago, it’s all been forgotten.

The 60 minutes we spent showing her around went better than Tracy and I expected. She struggles with the basics of typing and mouse movement, so we focused on playing solitaire. This game proved to be a good way to introduce he concepts of clicking, dragging, double-clicking and event using a menu (to deal a new game). I hope that she will spend an hour each day playing solitaire just to get more comfortable with the computer.

We launched MS Word for a few minutes to introduce her to letter writing and while I also think that was successful, there’s a lot of complexity in Word that we had to talk around. My hope would be that by next Christmas, she turns on the PC regularly, uses Yahoo! mail and web sites and occasionally plays a game.

AT&T disappointed in usual fashion where they promised a turn-up on December 24th only to find that there’s “insufficient capacity” in this area. I specifically asked the customer service rep to check that DSL was available in this home since I have found over-promising to be a frequent problem with AT&T. Just a few weeks back I tried to upgrade my personal DSL speed only to find that my line can’t support it… something they should have known prior to the switch.

We’ll be flying back down in a week or two to deliver the printer and setup the DSL once AT&T give the green light. After that, I move into mother-in-law tech support mode