Well, we did it! Or more to the point, she did it. This morning my mom put together a computer desk, unpacked her boxes of computer hardware and this afternoon she called, ready to rock.

Here’s the set-up we sent her;

1. 1.3 GHz P4 with 384 MB of RAM, equipped with PCLinuxOS 2007
2. Mouse
3. Keyboard
4. Printer
5. 15″ LCD monitor
6. Headset
7. Headset/Speaker switch-box
8. Speakers
9. Router for sharing existing connection
10. UPS
11. Power distribution box

With no idea of the name of each component, she learned as she went along. On the phone, she got the whole system together, plugged her computer and my nephew’s into the router and… nothing happened. She looked at it as Don talked her through what should be plugged into what, spotted the mis-plugged power cord on her own, corrected the error and the whole works lit up like Christmas. Yeehaw!

I talked her through a basic understanding of PCLinuxOS, the various parts of the KDE desktop and had her open a tutorial (simple text file which I wrote) in KWrite on how to open some of the programs on her computer. Then I told her how to open the Skype program which was already configured with my Skype identity as a contact. After a couple of fumbled attempts, all of a sudden it worked. Now we could talk without paying long-distance charges. Spent the next hour-plus learning how to open her Firefox browser and use Google to search the web. This is a woman who didn’t know what a monitor was yesterday.

That’s my mom. I’m so proud of her. By the time we wrapped it up, she had brain burn. Tomorrow evening we’ll have another session. We couldn’t get her KMail program to pick up her mail, so I have to check the settings in her gMail account to see if we set it up for pop3 access.

She’s on her way to computer literacy and I’m thrilled. It’s been a wonderful day.

Don got a really nice dinner.