Senior Computer Advisor

[ase]

The time has come to encourage my grandparents to get a computer. Any suggestions for features or warnings specific to the older crowd? First pass consideration is a cheap-ish desktop with webcam and the biggest LCD they're willing to pay for.

Comments

[ase.livejournal.com]

Vermont would be a pleasant change from this weekend's local temperatures, certainly.

I'm leaning toward a new box for my grandparents because I want something reliable. If my computer spontaneously implodes, I can take a shot at fixing it, but they wouldn't have the first idea what went wrong.

Ubuntu is one flavor of linux OS. In one well-buried corner of the website, it claims that you need 256 MB RAM and 2 gigs of free hard drive space. (Compare to Vista, which wants 1 GB RAM and 15 GB of a 40 GB hard drive for Home Premium.) Windows should not have left XP on the market so long; the Vista code bloat really ticks me off after many years of mostly-stable XP quirks.

[countrycousin.livejournal.com]

Well, Ubuntu sounds pretty hungry - you couldn't go back too far. Your new machine plan sounds best, but I do not want to go to Vista. Don't suppose I'll have a choice.

(One of my old machines is a 48k Apple ][, which was a pretty big machine for its day - they were selling a lot of 16k machines and I think started out with 4k. And that wasn't much because they used 1k for display and more for other system purposes. It was a beautiful machine. Ran Visicalc just fine.)