...always calls me up when she has a problem, before calling, say, her ISP's tech support.

Only problem is, I've never used Windows (well, I do access an occasional machine to test something on MSIE or Word, but it's like the difference between making coffee for yourselves in your own house, or making it in a friends' place). I don't know what she has to click to see what the dial-up is doing. I don't know where the preferences for e-mail encoding are. If I were near her computer, I could probably find it by rummaging around in the menus and using my geek intuition. But on the phone?

The annoying thing is that I loaned her my old Mac before she had this PC, and it just sat there and she never touched it. Then I took it back, and a couple of months later she's suddenly a netizen with full rights - but only on a bloody Win98 machine.

And you know what's even more annoying? I actually end up giving her some really good advice her ISP support person would not have given her (like: you can't connect to the Internet? Connect a phone to the same wall jack, and see if you get a dial tone. If not - it's probably that extension that has gone dead). This actually encourages her...