I've trained my mother to "just say no" and this caused her most recent problem. I have Norton SystemWorks on her computer. It monitors what programs are accessing the internet and when it doesn't have a rule for a particular program it asks if that program should access the internet.
When asked if a particular program should be able to access the internet she chose to block the program's access. It turns out that this was a Windows program that apparently needs to access the internet and her computer was not able to get on the internet. She called her cable modem service provider because she thought she was being nice by not bothering me. They sent a tech to her house who determined that Norton Firewall was the problem but only knew how to "fix" the problem by telling her to disable her firewall.
Finally after a while of my doing phone tech support with her she remembered that she had clicked "Block" on some message box, and I was able to get her firewall working properly again.
I've asked her to write a note when she gets messages like these in the future so I can figure out whats going on without a lot of digging. I'm still waiting to see if that works!
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I've trained my mother to "just say no" and this caused her most recent problem. I have Norton SystemWorks on her computer. It monitors what programs are accessing the internet and when it doesn't have a rule for a particular program it asks if that program should access the internet. When asked if a particular program should be able to access the internet she chose to block the program's access. It turns out that this was a Windows program that apparently needs to access the internet and her computer was not able to get on the internet. She called her cable modem service provider because she thought she was being nice by not bothering me. They sent a tech to her house who determined that Norton Firewall was the problem but only knew how to "fix" the problem by telling her to disable her firewall. Finally after a while of my doing phone tech support with her she remembered that she had clicked "Block" on some message box, and I was able to get her firewall working properly again. I've asked her to write a note when she gets messages like these in the future so I can figure out whats going on without a lot of digging. I'm still waiting to see if that works!