At least we were able to reach a new agreement: If a dialog pops up and she doesn't know what to do, she will take a photo before cancelling. I tried to explain that the well-meant advice on handling unexpected dialogs did not mean to always blindly press 'Cancel,' but I doubt this really reached her. Only when the anti-virus vendor shut down its update service did she finally cave in and ask for my help. But since the updater never made this clear, she had always cancelled the dialog and was proud to have managed the 'crisis' by herself.

This, of course, would have been free of charge, since her license ran for another three months. The reason was simple: The manufacturer had stopped supporting the old version of its product.Ī series of cautious questions to my aunt revealed that the anti-virus had been offering her to update itself for more than a year now. Its status confirmed that it had stopped updating its signatures a week ago. One day she begged me for help because her 'anti-virus wouldn't update anymore.' I sat down at her computer and found it to be running a three-year old version of the anti-virus product. The perils of cancelling well-meaning dialogs She followed that advice way too closely. At some point, someone (possibly even me) told her that if she wasn't sure about a dialog, pressing cancel was always the safest option. If I pressed cancel, would this cancel my order or would it cancel the 'back' command? And what if I continued? Just to be on the safe side, I closed the browser tab entirely and got my shoes elsewhere.Ī dear aunt of mine hits 'Cancel' on anything that offers her the choice. Below, there were two options: Continue or cancel. A warning appeared: If I went back now, this would cancel my order. To double-check, I clicked on the browser's back button. Recently I was ordering some sneakers online when I suddenly wondered whether I had specified the right shipping address.

Superantispyware download failing