Technology Support for Retirees: Which Problems are Worth Paying For

Somebody has probably sent you a list. Five free tech programs for retirees, or ten, with the library on it and AARP near the top.

It is a good list. Your printer still will not print.

Free technology support for retirees is built to teach you things. It is not built to fix something that broke tonight. The free options are real, and better than most people expect, which is why they end up on the same list as everything else. Nobody tells you which one you are looking at.

The free help is real, and this is what it is good at

Two of the better options are worth naming, because they are genuinely free and genuinely useful.

Senior Planet comes from OATS, an AARP affiliated charity. It runs free online classes and a technology hotline on 888-713-3495, open Monday to Saturday, staffed by specialists in English, Spanish and Mandarin. Anything more involved and they will book you a free one-to-one session over Zoom.

Libraries are the part people skip. Des Moines Public Library runs computer classes at its North Side branch, and lends Chromebooks there to use in the building. Every branch has free Wi-Fi and a public computer you can sit at for two hours.

Use them. If what you want is to understand how your phone works, or to get comfortable on video calls, or to stop feeling nervous about online banking, then a class or a patient volunteer on a Zoom call will do more for you than anything I could sell you, and it will cost you nothing.

Where technology support for retirees has to be paid for

What a class cannot do is open the machine.

A drive that has stopped spinning is not a knowledge gap. Nor is malware that comes back every time the computer restarts, or a laptop that powers on and shows you nothing. Those are jobs. Somebody has to open the thing, work out what failed, and then either fix it or tell you straight that it cannot be fixed.

The same is true of a router that drops the signal every evening, and of a new computer that needs years of files moved across before it is any use to you.

On a failed drive the honest answer is that sometimes the photos come back and sometimes they do not. Anybody who tells you which before looking at the drive is guessing.

The one problem that sits in both columns

There is exactly one thing on this page that belongs on both sides, and it is the one nobody rings about until it is too late.

Setting up a backup is teachable. A hotline or a library class can walk you through it in about half an hour, for nothing. Once it is running, it mostly looks after itself.

Recovering files you never backed up is the paid job, and nobody can promise you how that one ends. Both are the same problem caught at two different stages, which is why the free half is worth doing while it is still the free half.

Where the sorting breaks down

Two columns is a useful way to think and it is not a law.

Plenty of faults are learning gaps in disguise. A printer that "stopped working" is very often a printer that got set as the wrong default, and a free session will sort that out faster than I will. If it looks like a setting, treat it like a setting first.

The free route also runs on its own clock. Hotlines have queues and classes have schedules, and if your tax records are on a machine that will not start, next Thursday is not a plan.

And sometimes you simply cannot tell which column you are in. Nobody can, from the sofa. That is the whole reason a diagnosis should not cost anything.

How I fit into this

I am Adam Ricklefs. More than thirty years on computers, networks and infrastructure, working out of Clive, Iowa.

I only want the second column. The free options above handle the first one better than I would, and sending you to a class that costs nothing is not a loss to me. It is just the right answer.

For the rest, the consultation is free and basic remote support is $30 for the first hour. Remote means remote, so where you live matters less than people assume. In person, I cover the Des Moines metro.

Tell me what the machine is doing and I will tell you which column it belongs in. If it belongs in the free one, I will say so.