I've just spent a very frustrating half hour trying to help a neighbour with his laptop. It runs Windows 7, I think. He has a photo collection which has got in a complete mess with pictures scattered all over the place and several different desktop shortcuts, one of which refuses to work at all. You can't delete it either; if you try, the system hangs.

Shortcut no.2 turned out to be a duplicate of no.3, so I got rid of that. Shortcuts 3 and 4 point to different locations which both contain a weird mixture of photos, icons, example files and all kinds of rubbish which he swears is nothing to do with him. I hoped that I could at least pull over the photographs from one folder window to the other so that they all ended up in the same place, but even that proved impossible.

I have never seen such a user-unfriendly OS in my life! It seems to have some kind of virtual filesystem overlaying the actual one. The start menu entry for Windows Explorer shows some locations with normal DOS paths, but Explorer itself only shows the virtual system. It's based on something called libraries, but they aren't libraries at all, they're apparently random collections of data.

Everything seems to be set up to ensure that you can't fix problems, find your data or do anything you want. My neighbour says he constantly feels like a stupid old git and I ended up feeling like a stupid old woman. I told him he isn't stupid, he's just cursed with a stupid system.

I am thinking of giving him a dual-boot setup with Linux. He's not online and doesn't want to be. He uses his machine mainly to play card and board games and to store his picture collection. I thought if we can gradually transfer the pictures to Linux, he'll at least be able to organise them in a more user-friendly way so that he can find them when he wants them. I don't know if the games can be transferred but he could still use Windows for them if necessary.

No one should have to put up with what he has on that laptop.

Hi...

It sounds like you don't work with Windows that often, so it might be that you're not accustomed to how it works. Interestingly enough, there are folks who would say the same about Linux. I use both Windows and Linux and I see strengths and weaknesses in both.

Regards...

Anymore, the total amount of support I offer to anyone with windows outside of work is "I can reinstall windows, you'll lose any data you don't have backed up". Even at work, this is, more often than not, what I tell people. It's just not worth fighting windows.

Give him Linux and a nice image viewer
https://linuxappfinder.com/graphics/imageviewers
You might lure him with these, too
https://linuxappfinder.com/games/board
https://linuxappfinder.com/games/cards
Actually, I'm surprised they don't list PySol — 1000+ games for 8 different packs of cards. Pagat, with a Tarot pack, is a favourite of mine.
http://pysolfc.sourceforge.net/

Well from what I gather from your description of the person's computer, it also sounds to me that he probably doesn't know what he is doing in the first place - shortcuts referencing other shortcuts to probably nowhere. In truth any system can be dangerous to an inexperienced user - hell I see my parents opening multiple browser windows to go to the same bloody page that they have minimised on the taskbar, and I will see literally 5+ browser windows open. Nevermind that I have shown them how to use tabs - then they complain to me that their system is starting to slow down....*sigh*

It is also rather ironic, I am called upon to help them navigate or help fill something out on a website (government related or something like that) - which actually is not that hard and self-explanatory - yet also they do not have trouble with gaming sites, or anything that is completely useless

You're quite right! He hasn't the faintest idea how a computer works. But Windows encourages that sort of ignorance because it's set up to do everything behind the user's back, and also because the system is so bloody complicated. I mean, I don't understand what is going on here so what hope has he? At least if he had his pictures on a Linux partition, they'd be arranged in a simple file system, and if anything went wrong, it could be fixed. There's no fixing the mess he's got at the moment.

Well the saying goes: "They've made it foolproof, but there are better fools around."

As far as Win7 goes, it is not that bad (yes I know I am actually a Windows veteran) - but I also opine a lot about the days when Windows were 2 separate flavors, and the more professional users were on WindowsNT, but I digress. I think it would have been worse if he were introduced to 8 or 10, and I still do not understand how people say windows10 is faster, when I tested both 7 and 10 on my wife's laptop(it came with 8.1 by default), 7 still came out on top, but I still nuked everything and just put in UbuntuMate, everything works, and is faster still.

So, is his system is a dual boot system? If not how/why does he have a Linux partition - unless he has an IFS driver for Windows to have Read/Write to an ext2 partition?

At this point I would ask him what his main tasks are, and just introduce him to UbuntuMate (use a live boot) just to show him around, and if he agrees - backup all his important data, wipe the system and move him over to UbuntuMate. Just a thought.

No, no, you misunderstood me. I meant: If he were dual-booting and had his photo collection on the Linux partition and just used Windows for his games....

I already know that. He only does two things at the moment: plays simple games, and stores and views photographs. He doesn't even use Word.

I'm not sure about backing up. How do you back up data when you don't know where anything is? We'd need to use something like SystemRescue to browse around the existing partitions, find the directories that actually have photos in them, and copy those.

I'm sure it could run a Mate desktop easily. I looked the model up online and it's got 3 GB of RAM, so it's more powerful than my Bigboy and much more so than Littleboy. The graphics are ATI Radeon, which is not something I have any experience of. Because of that, I'd be inclined to use Mint Mate rather than Ubuntu, because Mint is more forgiving when it comes to hardware.

I've got some pic's to cheer you (and your neighbor) up!, Enjoy!

Attached Thumbnails

         

Ah ok, well if they are basic games (web) you should be able to get him over to Linux completely because Adobe in their wisdom finally decided to update flash for Linux (and hopefully they do not change their minds again).

Well you might have to do it the old fashion way - just open the explorer and to the upper right where you have the search field, start searching for *.jpg *.bmp, *.mp3 , etc etc. Not the best way, but it works.

I have actually had great luck with UbuntuMATE and my laptop. I would have preferred Slackware, but I can't get into XWindows, let alone figure out how to get wifi working, which is a pain. UbuntuMATE actually works, all devices work (not really, touchscreen doesn't, and I like that actually!) - but yea you have to download some proprietary software that Ubuntu tells you , but no big deal. Everything essential works, touchpad, sound, video, wifi, special keys like volume buttons on the side. Incidentally I wanted to actually use an LXDE flavor of Ubuntu, but for some reason I can't get the volume buttons to work on that, no matter what.

Anyways, I've gone onto a tangent again.

It does not matter which operating he uses, he will still have problems. He only uses the computer to play card games and store photographs, but has managed to create a mess with GUI links to links and probably other such things. Apparently he also does not have backup copies of the photos? For such a simple use-case, any OS will perfectly suffice. It would be much more productive to educate him in common sense computer practices, than convince him to switch to a different OS that he woud need to familiarise himself with.

It may be useful to find and transfer all his pics and games (if not default 'doze games) to another partition/drive, format the existing IpSys and reinstall and setup his account as having no administrative privileges. Win 7 already prevents some administrative tasks even from what they call "Administrator" to keep down tech calls. If he needs to actually do anything requiring more privileges he should contact Microsoft. They are, after all Pay to Play.

I just let Win10 do an update (I don't turn it on often). Recent i7 16Gig - took a day and a half. Holy mackeral !!!.
/rant

Full install of Slackware and applying any security updates takes me about 15min.

This is true. The windows desktop uses lots of "folders" which only exist as virtual locations defined in the windows registry. "libraries" are just one example, but possibly the messiest and most confusing. The file system has been partially hidden from the user, probably since windows vista at least, and the way things are going, in future versions of windows it's likely that a user won't be able to directly access drives via drive letters (e.g. "c:") at all. But the bad things about windows 10 in particular are also the bad things about google android. It's a move closer towards 'rootless' consumer devices.

The shortcut mess has likely been cause by the right click menu options "create shortcut here" and "send to...".

But unfortunately it's correct that if the user is not too savvy, they can also make a mess of any *nix desktop environment. However recovery from that is easier for you (usually just a matter of deleting a few dotfiles) as the volunteer support.