Unexpected Upgrade

Whenever I visit him, Dad asks me to take a look at his computer. It was running slow again, he said, despite my (deliberately) wiping his hard disk and reinstalling Windows last year. The grandchildren weren't the culprits, because they all now have their own computers and mobile devices.

Perhaps the Pentium-4 Dell Dimension 3000's time had finally passed. But since Dad only uses his computer for web-surfing, two-year-old versions of Quicken and iTunes to manage his business and music, respectively, and the Garmin Forerunner to monitor his morning walks, it's wasteful to discard a machine that's still working.

I checked the memory, and an interim solution became obvious. The installed RAM was a mere 768 MB, and the Dell had capacity for 2GB. The memory cost about $70 from Amazon (the Honolulu Best Buy didn't have it in stock) and arrived in four days. It took a few minutes to swap out, and the PC speed improved moderately.

The purpose of this preamble, dear reader, is not to bore you with a pedestrian recounting of a common upgrade but to point out how improvements can lead to benefits originally unforeseen.

Throughout my visit Dad had been eying my iPhone 4. I showed him family photos, my music library, its e-mail and web-surfing capability, the maps, calendar, and contacts apps, and, of course, how to make a phone call.

On the day before I left, he asked me to go with him to Verizon to buy an iPhone. He understood from the salesman that his monthly wireless payment was going to rise from about $60 to over $100, but he could handle the $40, and really, at his age why hesitate at getting something that he wants and can afford?

I was surprised and pleased as I watched my 80+-year-old father playing with his new device. I know people younger than he who refuse to get computers, e-mail addresses, and cellphones.

But back to the original point of this post. In order to integrate his iPhone with his PC I had to download the latest version of iTunes. The additional RAM installed a few days earlier was helpful in running the program and transferring his music and photos to the new phone.

In the end it was a successful trip. I couldn't help the folks renovate an upstairs bathroom--leave that to the professionals--but I was able to help them a little with their tech stuff. We do what we can.