I'll tell you what I did for my non-technical parents and sister - migrated them to OS X and let them be. Both my sister and my parents have been burned by out-of-date or non-existent anti-virus, lost data, etc, etc, etc, standard stuff really when using Microsoft operating systems in conjunction with high-speed Internet.
I gave my parents my old G3 iBook when I got a G4 iBook for my wife. Why give my parents a computer? Simple - I got tired of spending my time on the phone trying to diagnose "computer slowness" or any other one of a million technical problems that exists on Windows on a machine in Arizona. So, while I could have got $X for selling the laptop on eBay I calculated that I was at least 99.89% probable to spend $X + $1 in my time if they remained on Windows doing tech support. So giving them the computer was worth it. And being free, they couldn't really turn it down. Yes, there were some technical hurdles to overcome with switching but the number of tech calls has decreased dramatically. My sister got an older iMac (the ones that look like eMacs) so she could do iChat with my parents and now she is talking about upgrading to a new iMac. As they sang in South Park so many years go.. Happy happy happy, everyone is happy. And happy relatives on a better platform makes for a happier IT guy at home. I think there will be a time when Ubuntu gets to the point that I could have set up my non-techie parents and sister on that platform, but it's just not there yet. Close, and getting closer, but not yet. If they lived closer to me instead of 1000 and 2000 miles away perhaps I could have set them up and got them running with the occasional house call but that wasn't an option. Greg -- TriLUG mailing list : http://www.trilug.org/mailman/listinfo/trilug TriLUG Organizational FAQ : http://trilug.org/faq/ TriLUG Member Services FAQ : http://members.trilug.org/services_faq/
