IT help for the elderly

My MiL has forgotten the password to get into her laptop.

Is it a pain in the arse to recover/reset it?

Don’t know what she is running. Windows 10 at a guess.

You should be able to enter the wrong password, select ‘Forgotten Password’ and you’ll be sent a code to the registered email, or, if lucky, the registered phone on the account. This all assumes email set up, or accessible from another device and a password is remembered.

PS you’ll be required more and more as they get older.

Thanks.

Hopefully it has been setup to her Gmail account.

PS you’ll be required more and more as they get older.

This. I persuaded my dad that he didn’t need a laptop any more, as it was just causing too much trouble. They now have an Android tablet that they can do their bits of online shopping on and book appointments at the doctors, and look at photos that get shared with them. The most used passwords are written in a book (I know, but it works) and they have strict instructions to never reset a password if they can’t remember it, just to let me know and I’ll sort it.

Password keychain app and a device with fingerprint / face recognition unlock are invaluable in such situations

More information required. What’s the OS, is it a local account or a Microsoft account?

What Fossy said, but if you can’t get in by fair means then foul ones are out. Consider, if passwords were easy to bypass then it would defeat the point of having them. We can’t have Schrodinger’s Security, simultaneously strong enough to keep out the bad guys but easy to crack by the account holder.

If I were a betting man I’d say that a) you’re probably looking at a factory reset of the PC and b) she’s about to learn a hard lesson about the importance of backups.

Hindsight and that…

Hopefully it is something as daft as having the CAPS LOCK on.

Windows was probably registered to a tesco.net account, that has been defunct since 2018.

My mum no longer uses the laptop, and just uses an old ipad mini. We moved MIL to an android tablet – still had issues with using video calls, pressing wrong buttons and having the camera section straight at the ceiling, but it was correctable over the ‘call’.

Sky was always the biggest issue, or anything with the TV once FIL had passed away, and it was URGENT – e.g. switching the HDMI over as the TV wouldn’t switch automatically.  We’d tried to tell her to get rid of Sky due to the cost, but she wouldn’t.  Roll on some time, and I spot the Sky remote full of dust. ‘Erm, which remote do you use for Sky’ – she picks up the standard remove for the TV.  She’d not actually used Sky for months, so we got rid as she had forgotten how to use it. She would just press up and down on the remote until she found some crap she wanted to watch.

When FIL died, we just couldn’t access some of the laptops or iphones, etc. and ended up wiping them.

Consider, if passwords were easy to bypass then it would defeat the point of having them.

True, but it is a bit nuts sometimes. The other week I had to set up an account for something incredibly banal, like ordering a takeaway, and it needed a 12 character password with upper and lower case mix, plus at least one numeral and one symbol. Honestly, if someone’s that desperate for a chicken bhuna, I’ll buy them a chicken bhuna.

OAP IT support is a nightmare.

My in laws have two phone, two iPads, one ancient laptop and two password books. There are partial backups to iCloud, One drive and Dropbox, but none of these are complete. MiL gets approx 30-40 spam emails a day. Whenever they visit I have a list of things to sort out which takes hours. I do my best to tidy things up but they still feel incredibly vulnerable.

it needed a 12 character password with upper and lower case mix, plus at least one numeral and one symbol

Now that NIST password rules have been updated to suit the 21st century I hope that sort of thing will go away. It may take another 25 years for the auditors to catch up though.

NIST says:

Verifiers SHOULD NOT impose other composition rules (e.g., requiring mixtures of different character types or prohibiting consecutively repeated characters) for memorized secrets.

Parents now have a full suite of apple products, they arn’t OAP’s by any stretch. But the number of IT support calls that I’ve had is now zero, all the things talk to each other and automatically back up. Dad managed to jump from an old iphone7 to a brand new one the other week, zero faff.

⬆️This.

iPad plus iPhone. Nothing else. Having converted elderly next door and my mum over, I don’t ever get “the call” anymore.

Hindsight is always 20:20 though ?

Oh, and I’ve got a desktop pc to wipe on behalf of another elderly neighbour – it’s a pentium chip so I’m guessing it’s an hour or two just to start it up…

True, but it is a bit nuts sometimes. The other week I had to set up an account for something incredibly banal, like ordering a takeaway, and it needed a 12 character password with upper and lower case mix, plus at least one numeral and one symbol. Honestly, if someone’s that desperate for a chicken bhuna, I’ll buy them a chicken bhuna.

Agreed. As my old boss liked to say, “you don’t spend £1000 on a lock for the cupboard where you keep the pencils.”

OAP IT support is a nightmare.

This was my uncle.

I’d get a phone call, “my printer wasn’t printing in yellow…”

I think, OK, this is simple enough. “Are you with it at the…”

“… so, then I reinstalled Windows and now…”

Argh.

My in laws have two phone, two iPads, one ancient laptop and two password books. There are partial backups to iCloud, One drive and Dropbox, but none of these are complete. MiL gets approx 30-40 spam emails a day. Whenever they visit I have a list of things to sort out which takes hours. I do my best to tidy things up but they still feel incredibly vulnerable.

This is where we’re at with my Mum.

Ancient phone and even ancient-er tablet. We bought her a new Chromebook to try and get her off the tablet which is just riddled with bloatware and although she likes it, it’s also “too heavy” (she’s very frail) so anytime she’s anywhere in the house other than right by the Chromebook, she’ll be using her phone or tablet, none of which are reliably talking to each other, even though they’re all on the same Gmail account.

Doesn’t help that she’s got an older Hotmail account as well so she’s trying to flick between those, remembering which email address she gave to which friend.

My MiL has forgotten the password to get into her laptop.

I know this goes against all the “good advice” of passwords but… a password book. For old people who like writing things down, it’s invaluable. I set up Google Password Manager on the Chromebook but having the master password(s) written down is pretty much essential IME.

Mum is 91 so not surprisingly struggling.  A few things I’ve done that may help others.

Added my email as an additional recovery email for things like gmail

Changed her bank to the same as mine so I can easily help her with the app as I’m familiar with it.  She was with M&S but they shut down banking so an easy decision.

Moved her to her bank credit card so that everything is in the same app (she doesn’t really need the Tesco clubcard points)

I have added her Gmail credentials to my gmail account and all of her email gets put in a Mum folder on my email client for me to check

I know this goes against all the “good advice” of passwords but… a password book.

With my Security Hat on,

Very much this. It gets sneered at and mocked in security circles but this does neither party any favours. It is a “stupid” solution but really, what’s the actual risk here? If you’re burgled then it could be a problem but thieves targeting old people are looking for cash, jewellery and car keys, not the password to their Facebook account. The single biggest danger to my mind is insider threat – family members who may not have their best interests at heart.

No one can remember truly unique passwords for everything these days, so if you are not using a password manager (and that could be tricky for a lot of less confident users) a password book is the solution. The main risk would be if there is any untrusted person visiting the house that could get hold of the password book.

I like Chromebooks (or Android tablets). More difficult to break than a PC, and very easy to reset if all else fails.

Switching my Dad from his PC to a Chromebox reduced my IT support significantly, allowed to him keep using his big monitor and keyboard, and the Google cloud services kept all his photos, emails and docs automatically backed up.

My mum (86) had a problem with her email account. So she deleted it. OK, I said, we’ll set it up again – what’s the password?  Oh, she says, I dont think there is a password. And a bit later – can’t we just set up a new password ?

Luckily there WAS a password (surprise!) and it was written down in her password book, under another heading 🙂

You’ve all just reminded me that I need to have a chat with my father on all this. He’s starting to have some issues which again have gone from something he easily dealt with to ‘the phone keeps going on silent mode so I just installed a new phone app…’…

I’m going to ask him to set up a backup email address for reset that is mine or my sister’s email…

…so I just installed a new phone app…

Every time I see my Mum’s phone, I’m absolutely bewildered at the array of apps that are on there. The number of times I’ve gone through and cleared it out, got the 6 home screens down to two with neatly spaced apps and then next time – oh yes, we’re back to 5 screens of swiping, most screens with duplicates of apps…

“I don’t know, they just keep appearing, I don’t put them there…”

I have to support my 94 yr old father. My top tip is to, as much as possible, to get them on the same hardware/software/OS as you. It’s so much easier if you have the same thing in your hands to talk them through over the phone.

I find the hardest thing my far is dealing 2-factor authentication when he has no smart phone and his dumb mobile has no reception at his house. If it’s not a system that allows authentication via a landline call it’s not happening.

“I don’t know, they just keep appearing, I don’t put them there…”

Both my mother and my brother do this, instead of just accessing an app from one of the home screens, they open the app tray, search, press and hold, until it opens. Then 50% of the time they’ll have randomly jab another “confusing” button somewhere and added another duplicate to the home screen. My mum is nearly 80, so she has an excuse, my brother is younger than me, and has none, at all. He’s not even 50 yet and grew up with computers. (i didn’t have my own until i was well past 30). Also, he always has the latest iPhone, so should really have an idea of how to use it.

My mother also has the shakes (but denies it vehemently) so a simple pass word like “Password123!” will variously be typed “pASSWORD1231” or “Paasswordd1223!”, you get the picture.
She’ll then hit the “forgotten password” link and try and reset to the same password. But won’t be able to type the same password into both fields, or worst case, if the site only needs you to type it once, she’ll only have a vague idea of what the new password is…

She’ll then hit the “forgotten password” link and try and reset to the same password. But won’t be able to type the same password into both fields, or worst case, if the site only needs you to type it once, she’ll only have a vague idea of what the new password is…

This is why mine are under strict instructions to not reset passwords, and instead to let me know and I’ll sort it.

She retired (nearly 20 years ago) as an IT director, so she Knows What She’s Doing.

These days, we have restricted accounts for children, managed by a responsible adult. Perhaps we also need to recognise that we need restricted accounts for parents, managed by a responsible adult.

The most used passwords are written in a book

Fine by me as long as they don’t carry it around with them all the time.

I told my In Laws to write any new passwords down, I even gave them a little A6 book for it!

Only slight fly in the ointment is my M-i-L has very poor sight & my F-i-L has handwriting that would shame a doctor.

TeamViewer has been a godsend.

These days, we have restricted accounts for children, managed by a responsible adult. Perhaps we also need to recognise that we need restricted accounts for parents, managed by a responsible adult.

Did that for my FiL at the request of my then wife. As he has a habit of clicking on, and installing anything at all.
Then they went on a local council run “IT for pensioners” course, the leader said FiL would need to have proper rights to the laptop (they used their own). So i did as i was told.

The course leader then managed to get an entire room of pensioners to download a couple of viruses and i don’t know what else.
Thankfully i’d backed everything up to a couple of other locations, so a wipe and rebuild of the OS was needed. (Even the recovery partition was unusable.)

Complaints about the guy had went nowhere (they still run the course), but i suspect it was just someone who worked at the location, rather than anyone who knew how to work a computer, or how to teach pensioners.
His IT equipment is now the responsibility of my ex, and has been for several years. But pretty much everything needs a factory reset every few months.

pretty much everything needs a factory reset every few months.

As solutions go, it’s a solution. It’s what I did with my aforementioned Uncle in the end.

As well as being an obligate fiddler, he was an absolute menace for PC magazine cover discs. Remember the craze for “optimize your computer” shite like registry cleaners and RAM doublers, usually bundled with bonus foisterware? Using a web browser was an exercise in gynaecology, peeping through what remained window real estate sandwiched between eleventy toolbars.

So, I installed Acronis. It snapshots a clean copy of the OS, then when he’s inevitably ****ed it again he can reboot, hit an F-key and it’ll reimage it to the point of my last visit, whereupon he can make a fresh start on going in dry all over again. I think that was the last call I ever had from him.

 Perhaps we also need to recognise that we need restricted accounts for parents, managed by a responsible adult.

You can do this with Google Workspace, which lets you manage what individual users can do. For example I have removed permission to access the Play Store on my Mum’s Google account, so she can’t install random apps on her phone. You can manage users, passwords and all sorts of other stuff in the Google applications suite through a dashboard.

I have the original free Google Apps workspace from way back, so this doesn’t cost me anything, but if you are setting up a new Workspace the catch is that you need to pay a monthly subscription per user.

That’s really useful to know, thank you.

Likewise, thanks very much @kcr !

The course leader then managed to get an entire room of pensioners to download a couple of viruses and i don’t know what else.

My Mum had a habit of saving all her photos onto flash drives then taking them to friends’ houses and plugging them into their computers to show off her photos. Those things were in and out of countless bloody laptops and as a result, they were riddled with viruses as I found out when she gave me one of the flash drives to “organise” the eleventy million photos that were on there.

Something hijacked my FB account, locked me out of it and then said to put in credit card details. I was actually half way through doing it (it looked like a genuine FB page) when I thought “hang on a sec…”

Had to take the laptop to work and get IT to debug it, it took them a fair while. And then I had to destroy all the flash drives. She is now aware of Google Photos….

Just occasionally I think I ought to set up a better control of my passwords (but never do). They’re mostly the same and I stick them in a spreadsheet that’s stored up on the cloud.

But the world doesn’t make it easy. Last week I wanted to track a delivery of some bits for the new bathroom. Set up an account it said. OK. And a password. OK. That’s not secure enough. OK I’ll try one of my special ones. Still no good.

So I decided as I won’t be coming back to Palletways or whoever I’d use their suggested one (you don’t need to remember it. Google does it for you. “Confirm new password” Impossible to do it. Never mind I’ll just wait for the parcel.

So I decided as I won’t be coming back to Palletways or whoever I’d use their suggested one (you don’t need to remember it. Google does it for you. “Confirm new password” Impossible to do it. Never mind I’ll just wait for the parcel.

Err, you just go into google password manager, copy the password, paste it into the confirm box.

Just occasionally I think I ought to set up a better control of my passwords (but never do).

you would think differently if you’re shared password had ever been shared by wronguns. It didn’t cost me anything but it was 6 months of pissing about after MyFitnessPal was pwned. An app I might have looked at for about 5 minutes and determined I didn’t need.

As for the parents, if I’m taking time to spot scams as a fairly IT savvy person they don’t stand a chance. My dad is well in the habit of taking a photo of the screen and sending to me but he’s patient. Mum on the other hand has adopted the click more if you’re not sure technique.

Having a reused password for something you don’t care about is fine, so long as it’s only ever used for things you don’t care about.