On Apr 23, 2008, at 7:16 AM, Dennis Muhlestein wrote:
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?
Here's my .02
Keep her on Windows 98 and purchase a linksys (or whatever) firewall/
router to set between her machine and the Internet. As long as you
train her not to run email attachments I think she'll be fine
without protection on the machine itself.
I've tried to get Grandmas (or others) to run Linux in a similar
situation but my experience has been:
1) You become their support person and whether or not you like to do
that, you're stuck with it forever.
2) When older people are used to something, change is hard. She's
been using 98. No matter how much better (and I don't think anyone
will argue that pretty much any linux distro is better than Windows
98), She'll want to know who to do things that she was doing the 98
way and it will be difficult to teach and accomplish.
3) Nobody else knows how to use the machine either. At least in my
case, my Grandparents have lots of children/grandchildren/friends
etc whom all have a bit of computer advise when they visit. They
mess with settings/hardware and everything else. At least with
Windows, they all can keep the machine on the Internet and
functioning (all be it they do a pretty bad job of it sometimes).
With Linux, they're bound to break things. See #1
-Dennis
I second this opinion. I would do whatever it took to leave her
comfortable user interface alone, but provide a working, firewalled
connection to the internet.
I would only add that in my experience, Avast! antivirus has been MUCH
lighter weight than Norton and it's ilk (and, it's free for home
use!), but I do not know if it will run on 98 this old.
Good luck.
- Kimball
http://www.kimballlarsen.com
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