Friday, August 27, 2010

Computers and Home Schooling






Daniel is in 7th grade, and we've decided to home school him this year, for a variety of reasons. I really think we made the right choice, although we've always tried to have our kids in Mexican schools. Daniel, however, is at a point where he needs to fortify his English, and get ready for high school and college, which will probably be in English for him (although only God knows!).

I bought a computer for about $480, a desktop, and proceeded to install his Alpha and Omega CD-based program in it. To my chagrin, a message came up saying I needed 1048 MB of RAM, and the (cheap) computer I purchased didn't cut it. So I took it back the next day (to Sam's Club) and got a better computer (and a more expensive one) with 3 gigabytes of RAM. Confident, I tried to reinstall the home-schooling program. No dice.

Now what was wrong? I deactivated the firewall, anti-virus, tried again. No success. The next day I Skype-called AOP's tech support, and allowed them to remote-possess my machine. "I should have thought about this right away," the tech guy said, "your computer needs to have an English operating system."

So...how do you do chance a Microsoft 7 Home Basic from Spanish to English? Fortunately, our friend Enrique knew. He came and fixed it (legally), downloading a program from Microsoft site. Then several games of Dominion till 1 a.m., but that's another story.

So...Daniel is studying, in English, and we're adjusting, but it's working! That's great!

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