... Seriously.

A few years ago I replaced the computer I used to develop VB applications on and gave my parents my old one. My dad won't go anywhere near it. My mom loves it. The only thing she uses it for is e-mail, web browsing, and Yahoo. The computer is aging. At this point, in computer years it's probably older than Mom is. It's a Pentium MMX 200 running Windows 95. It needs upgrading - seriously.

Now, my mom is pretty sharp, and she won't be installing any software on the machine, so my question is, would you include putting Linux on her machine as part of an upgrade (or replacement)?

I have a Linux Mandrake 7.2 distro that I have used and played with in the past and it's very user-friendly. It would probably run like a charm on that old machine with little or no hardware upgrades needed.

I'm considering this, what do you think?

Go for it - what's the worst that can happen? I don't know how much ram you have but giving it a bit more is a pretty cheap option now.

Sure, my mum isn't really computer literate, but she can follow instructions - I set her up with a nice 400 Mhz and wrote up some instructions for her - When she wants to go on the net, she used to just look at the lil' instruction booklet, about a month later she can now do everything herself. If you mum isn't immediately comfortable with the linux environment, you may wish to do this as well. Of course, I'm just a phone call away if my mum needs any help, I'm sure your mum can call you when she has problems!

Good luck!

Steve

My mom's 77, and I'm about to put Linux on her machine. Whenever my teenage niece visits her, I have to go into windows afterward and clear out all the spyware and junk which accumulated over that weekend. I don't want to do that anymore. My mom knows how to check email, and that's about it...so switching to Linux is no big deal.

I put Suse on my dad's machine - he's 75 and loves it.

I've just installed my first Linux OS - SuSe 9.1. I love it but it's a huge learning curve and I still haven't got it working properly yet. I also built a PC out of bits and pieces of old equipment and got XP running on for my dad to use. Same as your mum - email, web maybe some word stuff but nothing heavy.

The decision is this - if your mum knows the microsoft world it's probably best to keep her in it and upgrade a bit. that way she'll probably keep it up. If she has to learn a lot of new stuff she may well pack it in. I massively underestimated how much my dad had to know just to open a web browser. But if your mum is interested in the PC itself and kean to learn again - try her on linux

either way tho' it would be kind to get her machine working at even a win 98se level :-) Go on, spend a few $....

g'luck

Go for it, but if you find mandrake a little slow consider DeliLinux. It will fly on a P200.

Here's a useful article on a similar topic:

http://www.divisiontwo.com/articles/linuxbeat3.htm



mark

/sorry-couldn't resist