"This is why I don't use the computer!"

My wife, a card-carrying Luddite when it comes to anything related to the PC, has (finally) started to use it with a little more regularity (like, once a week, tops:-). She strolled into our livingroom this morning and sat down in front of our PC to order something online for some friends who just had a baby.

She logged in to her Windoze XP account and clicked on the exploder icon (despite the fact that I installed Firefox long ago). She was immediately assaulted with a seemingly never ending stream of popups both from IE, and from the AIM client that automagically launched itself (and logged in as my daughter?!). Her reaction: "See, this is why I don't use the computer!".

After I stopped laughing, I asked her why she wasn't using Firefox. She responded that it wasn't on the screen for her to choose. (I think that Windoze helpfully removed it when she clicked "Yes" on the friendly reminder that informed her that there were "unused icons on her desktop, would she like to clean them up?")

So, we (re)added Firefox to her desktop, removed IE from her desktop icons (which I should have done long ago), dismissed all of the popups, exited from AIM and IE, and launched Firefox. "Oh, this is much better!", she exclaimed. Another convert! (Maybe she'll remember next week when she logs on next:-)

Now, all I need to do is convince my daughter to start using Trillian instead of AIM for all her IM needs so that we will no longer be assaulted with AIM's inane popup ads everytime we log in to our respective accounts (there doesn't appear to be a way to get it to launch only for a given XP user account).