All of this just seems like hassle for all of you, luckily my mum just uses a combination of phone and tablet for everything so I very rarely even get a question. Hate dealing with other peoples problems, spend enough time dealing with them at work.
Okay, that's not the Mac App store. It's just a selection of widgets that can be used with Dashboard. She needs to launch the Mac App store application (application folder or the dock).
My mom is one of the most computer illiterate people I know, yet she has no issues with her iMac. My stepmother is also utterly computer illiterate, but has no problems with her Macbook Air. My invovlement in doing tech support for them has been minimal since they switched off Windows PCs. I'm surprised your mom is having so much trouble. I'm wondering if the freezing could be due to a hardware failure, maybe bad RAM or a bad mechanical HDD. There's nothing magical about Mac hardware. You can have DOA machines just like with Windows PCs. Have her take it to the genius desk. Also sign her up for some classes so she learns how to use it. https://www.apple.com/retail/learn/
On the other hand, my parents are computer illiterate too and they have no issues using stuff like youtube to find their obscure chinese/vietnamese news channels and dramas and they even know to play local video on the tv via hdmi as well as using the chromecast I got for them on the windows laptop and a chromebook. I'm quite the proud "parent" You went to foreign grounds though bfun. That's a step I would never take. It's an impossible task to help someone with their issues that you're not familiar with. For me to get my parents a mac system, I would have to be well versed with mac os first. The only reason I got my mom an iphone 5 when it launched was because I owned a second generation ipod touch some years before that.
Hangs/freezes during an install or launch of software can often just be the software itself. I'm guessing many of those widgets are not exactly new and some might be incompatible with the current version of the OS. That can also be true with some things in the Mac App store as well. You might want to tell your Mom to at least be generally aware of the 'Compatibility' info that is listed with Apps in the Mac App store.
@Khaid True. My brother's wife has a Macbook Pro. My wife has a Macbook Air (that I'm allergic to). We are both pretty familiar at this point with OSX. It wasn't really unfamiliar territory for us, so helping them switch wasn't that bad. I guess bfun is totally unfamiliar with Macs? It kind of sounds like she wasn't even in the real app store. It's pinned by default to the dock and looks like this: Seriously dude sign her up for the free classes. Macs are not complicated and Apple will do all of the work of teaching her how to use it.
Limiting the user's account and disabling unnecessary plugins applies to all platforms: Windows, Mac, and even Linux. What needs Java? Does she play Minecraft?
Well here is the update to my story. My mom wants to return the iMac to the store this week...for another iMac. She thinks the one she has is laggy so she wants the faster processor. She's telling me that the mouse freezes for several seconds when she opens and closes windows. I find that hard to believe but whatever. I think Apple gives her a 14 day no question asked return policy. I'm actually trying to convince her to pay another $200 for the 256GB flash drive which would be a huge boost over the 5400rpm drive they use by default. Accurate. She called support the next day and he said she was in the Apple store and that he had no idea why it would have caused an issue. In fact I think the whole store thing is just a red herring. She thought the freeze happen several minutes after the store visit error so it may have had nothing to do with it. The tech told her that since the machine was brand new it may have been "indexing". I dunno. Right. I thought it was a good idea but the guy at the store said people need to bring their mac to the classes and my Mom can't be hauling her iMac around. I don't know if that's store policy or what. I'll ask another associate about how she can attend without bring in her own machine. So anyway I now need to wipe an iMac. Any tips? I know I could just ask the store to do it by I don't think my Mom would trust that.
Why would you need to wipe it? My suggestion would be to look at the Dashboard and close out the widgets running in it (Notification Center runs widgets as well, and you get those from the App Store...that's probably why the guy thought she was in the App Store even though she wasn't). Then use the Disk Utility that's included in the Utilities folder to check the disk permissions. That's just an Apple thing for the OS. Sometimes the permissions can be wrong and need to be fixed. If you do wipe it, you'll need to create a Yosemite boot disk on a thumb drive. http://www.macworld.com/article/2367748/how-to-make-a-bootable-os-x-10-10-yosemite-install-drive.html
I'm pretty sure if you have a desktop, you can just use one of the machines in the store during the class. I think you're gettiing wrong information.
Why? To remove any personal information. It wouldn’t be much but it’s there. Probably. I distinctly heard the guy say that people bring in their own machines to the classes but you'd think he should have mentioned they'd offer a laptop if a customer owned a desktop like the one we were looking at. I was talking to someone else so didn't get a chance to ask more about it. If I go back I'll ask again.
Oh, I thought you were considering a fresh install of the OS as a possible performance fix. You don't need a boot disk then. https://support.apple.com/kb/PH18869?locale=en_US
Went back to the store and convinced her to get the 27" 5K version. That has got to be the nicest screen I've ever seen on a desktop.
Your Mom now has better monitor technology than most of the people on this forum. Beats mine by a wide margin.
I thought the 21.5 looked better than all of mine but when I put the 5K next to that it was even better. The colors just seemed more vivid but not the least bit over saturated. What i really like was how I could blow all the text up super big and it stayed perfectly sharp. The 21.5 got fuzzy at the same size.
So you thought you were going to return it and got upsold to the most expensive machine they sell. lol
Not exactly. She was planning to upgrade to a faster 21.5. I'd been telling her she'd like the 27" which also has the faster components but she thought the screen was overwhelming. Of course once you spend some time on the 27 the 21.5 begins to feel small. Mac also handles the high res so much better than Windows does. The only 5K negative I have so far is one of her programs is locked at a lower resolution and now it's tiny on the screen. Also not the most expensive. On that very day they dropped the 2 high-end non-5K 27" iMacs from the lineup, lowered the price of the top-end 5k by $200, and added a new $2000 5K machine to fill the middle. So now it's $1800, $2000, and $2300 I read about it that morning and couldn't believe they made all the changes that day. The guy at the store said no-one knew it was going to happen until they were told that morning. They shipped their old 27" stock back to Apple and got the new $2000 version that morning.
I think the mother-in-law's PC might have a bad CPU fan. She said her next computer would be a MAC. She's a retired teacher. Wonder if she can get any kind of a deal on a mini.