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My Oldest Client


raymac46

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She's 90 years old - a retired Methodist minister who lives in a seniors home in Ottawa. I fixed up an old Dell 530 Inspiron desktop for her. It has a Pentium E2160 dual core, 2 GB DDR2 RAM, 160 GB HDD, an Nividia 520 video card and a D-Link wifi adapter. Real crashbox that ran Vista once but now has Linux Mint 17. The lady somehow screwed up the LM menu so it didn't work so I had her brother pick the box up and bring it here.

She had turned on the panel edit switch somehow so nothing on the panel worked. I fixed that in 5 seconds but took the opportunity to update to LM 18.2 while I had it here. That should keep her going a while.

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This was an old Lillian machine, believe it or not. Her son-in-law botched a Vista to Windows 7 update and it ran like an absolute dog. Lillian didn't want it even though I told her it would be fine with Linux. So I took it away and gave it to Jean who had an even older crappier Linux desktop.

Lillian has been through an all-in-one, laptop and 2 iPads since then while this old desktop keeps chugging along. It would have fixed Lillian's IT problems permanently at no cost - but that is another story. The desktop is 10 years old now.

Considering its age and memory I should probably install a lighter desktop but Jean is used to Cinnamon. She doesn't do anything strenuous and the old beast is still pretty snappy once it gets everything loaded. I replaced the internal graphics with a low end Nvidia card I had here and put in a PCI wifi card so she can pick up the wifi LAN in the old folks home.

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I've logged in on the old desktop. With Google Chrome and the system monitor running I'm up to 1.1 GB of the 2 GB memory. It still seems snappy enough given it's a slow dual core and a 10 year old machine.

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securitybreach

It's amazing that it is still functional after 10 years.... As long as she is not running any javascript heavy sites, light browsing should be fine.

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Major bummer. As part of the upgrade I had to re-login to her Gmail account.

  • She cannot remember her password.
  • She cannot remember the answer to her security question.
  • She cannot remember when she set up the account.

As a result we are locked out of her account and I had to set up a new one. She'll lose all her emails and addresses. No way to get in though as we cannot prove she is the owner of the old account to Google's satisfaction.

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Have done it many times and without the password, security question or any idea when you started using Gmail you are dead. Google simply will not validate you as the owner.

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May I assume she's using Firefox on the Cinnamon desktop? If so, you can find saved username/password combos in Firefox from Edit>Preferences>Security>Saved Logins (assuming the "Remember Logins for Sites" box is checked). I believe the default in Firefox is to remember the logins. Assuming so, bottom right is a checkbox to "Show Passwords" and you can see the username/password combo for all previously successful site logins. Once you log her back in to her Google account, don't forget to hide the passwords again!

 

If she uses Chrome, it's in Settings>Advanced>Manage Passwords, which will provide a list of usernames and hidden passwords for all successful site logins. Selecting the "3 dot menu" and "details" will pull up the specifics of that site login, with hidden password, but the "eyeball" is available to see the hidden info. Good luck!

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Sadly I had just finished reinstalling Linux Mint from scratch so all the settings were lost. The good news is that after another try we were able to verify her ownership by sending an email to her brother's iPad while visiting her to deliver the PC. He got a verification code that worked right away.

Long story short we were able to reset her password and get her old Gmail account back. :clap:

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Just a thought.

You could set up KeePass for her and then she only needs to remember one password. Also you can use one of the plugins to make a back up of the data base to automatically keep in DropBox. That way you would have a copy of her passwords of site if anything goes wrong. Of course you still would need her master password.

There are a load of other ways to use the plug ins for auto backups. I have just set up a new/old Dell with W7 pro for my sister using KeePass with a auto backup plugin as I know she will never make backups if left to her own devices.

 

http://keepass.info/plugins.html

 

:breakfast:

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I thought about a password manager but really all she needs are an admin password for updates, a password for email and one for Facebook. I already knew her Facebook and Linux admin password. It was her email that was the problem.

Google uses all kinds of AI to help validate your email. It was much easier to validate when we were back using her old familiar IP at the seniors home than it was when I had the PC on my LAN.

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I didn't realize you tried to validate at a different IP.

Yes google keeps track of what IP logged into the account. I regularly get emails at my recovery email address even if a different browser is used. (We have 3 gmail accounts - mine, my husband's for his alumni association and my husband's person account).

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securitybreach

I didn't realize you tried to validate at a different IP.

Yes google keeps track of what IP logged into the account. I regularly get emails at my recovery email address even if a different browser is used. (We have 3 gmail accounts - mine, my husband's for his alumni association and my husband's person account).

 

Which is a very good things to do. :)

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