One of my clients, who also happens to be a grandmother, has recently decided she wants to get on the internet for the very first time (this is not a joke).
Unfortunately she has an extremely old machine. Here are the specs. Pentium II 400Mhz, 64MB RAM, 8GB HD, Win 98 (not SE) This computer runs like a champ and it's in pristine condition, I was thoroughly impressed. However it has no NIC card. Only a small handfull of NICs sold locally will support Win98 classic, although many/most do support 98/SE. Additionally I hesitate placing this machine on the internet, there is no way it will run anything akin to Norton or McAfee without slowing to a crawl, and without something to help out, it'll probably be compromised in 30 minutes or less. All the poor woman uses the machine for is playing games like hearts and solitaire, some simple book-keeping, a little word processing, and now web and email, since the grand-kids are all off to college now and never write. My initial thoughts were to upgrade her to some version or another of Linux for instance Xubuntu. However on closer examination it appears that none of the desktop distro's will support a configuration this low. That seems a shame, to me, Ubuntu and it's ilk are finally to the point where I can feel comfortable recommending them to less computer savvy users, but now the system requirements have ballooned. The mini-distro's on the other hand all seem to smack of "not yet ready for grandma", either having odd default window managers, obscure package management schemes etc. I could teach this lady Ubuntu in a day or maybe two, but if she we to move to something say DSL, it would probably be weeks or more before she could get handle on it. Her computer is perfectly serviceable as-is, I see no reason to recommend to her that she scrap it just so she can get one that "does the internet", and on her budget it would probably be unfeasible to do so anyways. Does anyone have any suggestions for a good light weight, easy to use, easy to configure, easy to manage, desktop oriented OS for someone in the situation? Thanks in advance! Sincerely, Steve p.s. Why is it that no OS that could be run by grandma, could run on grandma's machine? /* PLUG: http://plug.org, #utah on irc.freenode.net Unsubscribe: http://plug.org/mailman/options/plug Don't fear the penguin. */
