Dave Fawthrop wrote:
On Wed, 12 Apr 2006 17:43:38 +0100, Geoff Beale
wrote:

|The Natural Philosopher wrote:
|
|
| 2/. Buy a cheap reliable PC locally, install LINUX, spend the time to
| get it working exactly as desired and install at parents house with
| training session.
|
| Linux will do at vastly improved reliability all the basic things -
| web, mail, word processing etc.
|
| Of cpurse if they want to edit videos, download gangsta rap, and play
| doom, its not the OS of choice...;-)
|
|One reason for using Linux that has not been mentioned, and may not be
|understood by Windows users, is that all the software that they could
|ever want comes free with most Linux distributions. SuSE is a good one
|and easy to install.

But on Windoze we expect things to be absolutely *dead* *easy* to install.
Half a dozen clicks and it works.

I have a copy of Red Hat Linux somewhere which did not get used because I
was not willing to read and understand umpteen pages of documentation,
before I could get it running

This is a valid point. However, once you have Linux running, it doesn't
crash, or need rebooting endlessly. This may be relevant in the context
of a remote installation with people who are unlikely to fiddle, or ant
to download and install heaps of crap.

The biggest downside to Linux is that there are still many sites that
ONLY work with IE6...and some of them are online banks...there is not
browser for Linux that is absolutely guaranteed to have the same bugs
and workarounds and sloppy coding as IE6 and its excuse for Java.

Its all very well talking about remote maintenance, but that requires
the PC to be up and running to some level first.