Every day I help “seasoned citizens” make the most of their computers which usually amounts to handling pictures, checking email and surfing the web.

Invariably, computer problems crop up which quickly confuses and frequently frustrates grandma and grandpa.

Friends and neighbors, the next time the senior citizens in your life clamor about going online, getting pictures of the grandkids in email or playing Soduko it’s critical you steer them away from buying a computer.

[ Pause to listen to the collective reaction of shock from my audience ]

Simply put, there is no rational reason to buy a computer for grandma and grandpa.

You already know how complicated computers can be. Click this. Open that. Run that. Right-click the other. Reboot.

Right? Right.

That’s all completely unnecessary for 99.9% of the older generation.

So how do you get grandma and grandpa on the web? How do you email them pictures? How do they play Words With Friends?

With a tablet. That’s how.

When I say a tablet I don’t mean a pill. I mean a tablet PC like an iPad 2 or a Kindle Fire.

For a large easy to view screen I suggest you go with the iPad 2. The entry level model comes in at $499 which is about the same price you’d pay for a PC with a monitor. If you’re on a budget the Kindle Fire is hard to beat at $199 but be warned; the Kindle Fire doesn’t do as much and the screen is quite a bit smaller.

Either way — the seasoned citizens in your life get the best of everything they want from the online world with none of the hassle.

Happy holidays!

Welcome to this special Black Friday Edition of Technology for Tightwads!

If you read my last Technology for Tightwads blog post on the Roku and it didn’t grab you, I understand.

OK so a buy-it-once-and-own-it-forever Roku for $80 is not your answer to TV-based entertainment.

How about an $80 buy-it-once-and-own-it-forever cable box with built in DVR?

No, that’s not a typo. It’s a TiVo.

You can purchase a TiVo with a street price of $79.99 and OWN your cable TV box and record up to 80 hours of TV thanks to the built-in DVR features.

Oh did I mention that a TiVo can do almost anything a Roku can do too?

Wait. Someone there in the back of the room has their hand raised. “How can a TiVo cost the same as a Roku yet do so much more?”

Good question. There’s a small catch, yes.

TiVo has two service plans; $19.99 per month or $500 for life.

I don’t suggest you go with the $19.99/month plan. Then you’re not saving any money. The average monthly rental fee for a cable TV company DVR box is $20 a month too. It’s true that the TiVo does much, much more than any cable TV box so dollar for dollar you are getting much more bang for your buck if you decide to buy a TiVo and then pay the $20 monthly fee.

But you’ll want go with the $500 plan and never pay another cable box rental fee again. In just about two years you’ve recovered your $500 investment and then get to enjoy all the features you could ever want in a cable box with DVR to record all your shows — and pocket an easy twenty dollar bill in savings month after month after month.

Happy Thanksgiving! Eat well and relax with family and friends.

You’ll need to be all revved up for tomorrow. It’s Black Friday! Play Hard! Play Fair! Play to win!

With Thanksgiving upon us let’s all reflect on everything we have to be thankful for.

Let’s count our sanity as one of the most important things.

How do you keep your sanity? Keep track of your passwords.

Every single day – without exception – I encounter at least one user who is forced to scramble for their password to login to a website and they end up stuck. Sometimes permanently. More often than not they are forced to do a password reset which fails roughly half the time because the user doesn’t remember the answer to their security question, doesn’t have access to an older email address, etc.

When that happens it’s game over. No access to email. Or online banking. Or their favorite online game. It’s game over.

All of this wastes time and builds frustration — needlessly!

The answer? Simple? Keep track of your passwords. Doing this is so fast and so easy it’ll amaze you.

Just create a Word file, Excel spreadsheet or just a plain notepad document and save it to your desktop. In this file you’ll put your various website login usernames and passwords. The end result? The next time you need to look up any given website login, you’ll have that information in just a few seconds with a couple of mouse click.