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.
Sounds like it's too late to worry about that.
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
This can be a plus. My mother-in-law was constantly thinking her
computer was broken because her grandkids would change settings or their
games would disable networking. Now she has Linux and she doesn't have
the root password. Her grandkids leave it alone and it just works for her.
If you can upgrade her memory (check DI), do it.
I would add that if you keep her on Windows, discourage use of Internet
Exploder. Even with hardware firewall and AV software, it's just an
exploit waiting to happen, and I don't think you'll get any security
updates for whatever the latest version is that runs on 98 (5.5?).
Delete all IE icons, and make firefox the default.
I've had vector linux running ok on 128 MB machines. But OOo and
firefox were not exactly speedy.
FWIW,
Barry
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