61–70 of 221 posts
* Drop linux on it with a simple GUI on it and lock the machine down. Don't give him root access or admin rights. Make sure the machine updates and backs itself up without intervention. * Set up his browsing inside a vm that gets recreated on boot (any host OS, linux as guest would be ideal but any will do).
tldr: Linux. I had more or less the same issue (except things still booted) with my parents about 5 or 6 years ago. In a move I thought was insane, I put them on Xubuntu. I moved them to Mint for a while, but they are back to Xubuntu. It's my preferred distro, and the Ubuntu base (for good support) and XFCE (Windows familiarity) made me comfortable it was Mom and Dad proof. Aside from showing them where things are, t…
You cannot protect people from their own ignorance.
How about a Chromebook? Cheap, keeps itself up to date, fully cloud based. It wouldn't tick the Lightroom box but it does the internet based stuff extremely well with low maintenance.
She didn't realize that the password to log in to your computer was the sync'd to her Google password. So she would type some random password 5 times, until the Chromebook said "use your Google password to reset your Chromebook password", and would then log in with that. Every single time.
Some website managed to convince her to switch to developer mode to install a non-web-store extension that overwrites the new tab page and search functionality with ads. Chrome is a little more aggressive about not letting you change the New Tab page these days, asking you occasionally if you still want the extension to control it (even for the new tab page I use, an extension from Google).
But despite that, she got a lot out of the computer, so overall it worked quite well. And we fixed those two issues, so I don't think there are any problems now.
How about a Chromebook? Cheap, keeps itself up to date, fully cloud based. It wouldn't tick the Lightroom box but it does the internet based stuff extremely well with low maintenance.
Lightroom to me means the user is in the more advanced category. I'm routinely amazed at what Google photos does without any input (tagging, grouping, enhancing), and if I want to tweak pics Snapseed works really well. The only time I startup LR now is if I pull the DSLR out.
Nearly every time it takes me hours if not days to do a bunch of scans, install updates and purge whatever garbage has been installed by various malware that she's somehow managed to find. I've done more than a few clean wipes, bought her new machines and yet still she figures out how to kill it again. Most of the time it's caused by her playing some silly online puzzle game, or clicking a link in an email or some sort of fake notification... or AOL, which she refuses to ditch even though it's a huge vector.
It's been decades and she still hasn't learned how to avoid this stuff correctly. I've tried every malware scanner & notification software on the market, and each one of them is eventually bypassed by clever malware or in some cases like AVG or Norton, BECOMES the friggin problem.
Basically, my conclusion is if your parent has a problem like this the only solution is refuse to help them anymore if they insist on using Windows as their primary web device and make them get a Mac and/or an iPad, maybe a Chromebook as others suggested. Then get rid of the Windows PC or simply tell them not to use it for anything other than printing / scanning etc. There is no winning otherwise. Windows for some folks is just plain bad news
tldr: Linux. I had more or less the same issue (except things still booted) with my parents about 5 or 6 years ago. In a move I thought was insane, I put them on Xubuntu. I moved them to Mint for a while, but they are back to Xubuntu. It's my preferred distro, and the Ubuntu base (for good support) and XFCE (Windows familiarity) made me comfortable it was Mom and Dad proof. Aside from showing them where things are, t…
Use Deepfreeze or something similar. You'll mark a their documents directory as excluded and then every time they restart their machine it'll be back to the exact state it was in when you first set it up. You don't want to have to support them using a new OS for the first time - you'll be in for a headache. I use Deepfreeze for anyone who is a "problem user" and most don't even realize they have it if it's set up rig…