Hi Brent,
Please don't take what I'm about to write the wrong way because it is meant to get you in better more positive state towards stuff You claim makes you feel stupid, and just about everything else you just posted...
First off, stop feeling bad and stop beating yourself up because you didn't attempt to learn more about computers because to tell you the truth, the only reason why I was able to become really comfortable with the technology was because as I was learning @ a similar pace as you feel you're learning now, I wasn't so computer savvy at all and I would be stretching it a bit to say that I was computer literate... The reason I got comfortable was because suddenly I had too much free time after I first got sick and ended up becoming disabled which still didn't stop me from getting myself back into shape to return to work...
But what I'm trying to share with you is that I too couldn't take a formal course consisting of going to classes and to learn at someone else's pace if I had so many different doctor appointments physical rehab, weekly blood work and brain fog from having too much ammonia build up in my blood stream which is the cause of Hepatic encephalopathy... Meaning that I was incapable to go through traditional learning methods yet had to come up with one way to learn this computer stuff because I knew that it would be important to be fluent in once I was able to return to the workforce in one capacity or another...
I was given a few CD's with self paced courses in learning MS word, Excel, Power Point, Access at the time and so I started to learn 2 my own pace which was better for me considering the circumstances surrounding my life at that time... I would recommend them to anyone who wants to learn at their own pace... I was able to learn a lot of what I needed to know and it was instrumental in leading me down a path to feel so much more confident about working with computers as well as how software works on a level that is necessary to be able to make the software function in a manner that helps you complete various aspects of a project without having to know in detail what every single line of code means, or any other unnecessary details regarding how these program applications work...
And I can tell you this... You never stop learning because the technology is always changing so you learn what you must in order to stay current and leave everything else that you really don't need to know about alone so you don't worry about whether or not you're going to retain the lessons you learned... These courses teach you how to navigate the software applications like MSN Word, Excel, Power point, etc., but that's it! These courses only teach you what is necessary to use the software application efficiently without getting into the nuts and bolts of how the software is written to a certain code, or any other irrelevant information that you don't need in order to become proficient in the use of them...
I have those CD's around somewhere and they're Windows XP based so hopefully one of your sons can partition your hard drive or add a separate one so that you can run any software that written for Windows XP... Because I can once i find them easily make you copies of all of them for you to use my friend, and I think I have a CD that covers how operating systems work and the guts inside PC that makes it work as well as showing you how to do some basic computer troubleshooting with the operating system that you already have, and probably some other goodie to help you learn the in's and out's and shortcuts, tricks and other stuff about PC's in general... I have other learning courses also but, these are what you need to learn currently so, I'm not going to overload you with unnecessary and, potentially intimidating information that you really don't need to learn at the time being so you can focus on the topics you need to learn about...
So give me a couple of days to find them and when I do, I'll PM you to let you know what exactly I have so that when I'm ready to send you the CD's, they will only be with the topics you're interested in learning... Reads good to you?
reads good to me1
I'll let you know when I have everything ready Brent.
Respectfully,
Henry