bobbytomorow Posted April 24, 2008 Share Posted April 24, 2008 Shes like pretty well every other middle aged woman, that is she is a total noob. The thing is she has an aging PC (Pentium 3 550MHz, 512mb RAM, 64MB Geforce2), now its fine for windows xp but everytime I visit her shes got a bunch of spyware and crap slowing her pc down. Plus I think a Linux distro would generally run faster for her on a P3. All she does is basically surf the net, plug in her camera and do some mild picture editing in picassa. What woul be a good distro for her? Prefferebly one thats totally GUI. Thanks :) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ap0x Posted April 24, 2008 Share Posted April 24, 2008 Ubuntu maybe? Edubuntu...lol... Bah just wait for the linux experts... For my parents I installed ubuntu...they just need to surf anyway. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Pc_Madness Posted April 24, 2008 Share Posted April 24, 2008 Ubuntu should work shouldn't it? 512mb ram should be the win. :) Picassa will be abit more difficult. Theres a Linux version, but it has to run under Wine. And the camera. :\ Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Badtz-Maru Posted April 24, 2008 Share Posted April 24, 2008 if she just uses memory cards, then plug and play should be fine... picassa is the main issue. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
c3i89g Posted April 24, 2008 Share Posted April 24, 2008 Depends on the camera. You may have no problem with it. Before you switch your mom's OS on her, what have you tried to minimize or eliminate the infection reoccurrence? Have tried an always on piece of software, like Spybot? Have made your mom a limited user instead of an administrator? Have you set up automatic updates and regular spyware/virus scans, perhaps weekly, or even nightly? Just a few suggestions. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Darrian Posted April 24, 2008 Share Posted April 24, 2008 OS X Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ToM211 Posted April 24, 2008 Share Posted April 24, 2008 Shes like pretty well every other middle aged woman, that is she is a total noob. The thing is she has an aging PC (Pentium 3 550MHz, 512mb RAM, 64MB Geforce2), now its fine for windows xp but everytime I visit her shes got a bunch of spyware and crap slowing her pc down. Plus I think a Linux distro would generally run faster for her on a P3. All she does is basically surf the net, plug in her camera and do some mild picture editing in picassa. What woul be a good distro for her? Prefferebly one thats totally GUI. Thanks :) Right, I think from personal experience that Mandriva 2008 is completely user friendly and has the taskbar/button like windows xp. Also, please specify the camera and picasa is multi-platform so their is no worries about that :) Mandriva:http://www.mandriva.com/ Picasa: http://picasa.google.com/linux/index.html Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
markwolfe Veteran Posted April 24, 2008 Veteran Share Posted April 24, 2008 OS X I am pretty sure it can't be installed on the target PC. Ubuntu should be fine. Even Xubuntu might be nice, get a little lighter resource usage, but still visually pleasing and easy to use. (My wife liked Xubuntu, but one problem kept her from using it as her daily OS - I will update it from 7.10 to 8.04 as soon as it is available, and we will see if that solves the keyboard problem). Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
The Rev Posted April 24, 2008 Share Posted April 24, 2008 ur gonna puch linux on a 40 yr old??? eek. GL with that... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
yanowhiz Posted April 24, 2008 Share Posted April 24, 2008 (edited) Kubuntu would probably be a good option. It designed more for GUI than Ubuntu is. Kubuntu is designed on KDE, rather than gnome and KDE is a little more resources intensive but you don't have to do as many things manually as on gnome (Ubuntu). You might also get some ideas from this thread: https://www.neowin.net/forum/index.php?showtopic=631724 Edited April 24, 2008 by yanowhiz Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+unabatedshagie Subscriber¹ Posted April 24, 2008 Subscriber¹ Share Posted April 24, 2008 I would suggest ubuntu what with Hardy getting released today. As for picasa, google has a repository with picasa in it, instructions for getting it are here. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
MR_Candyman Posted April 24, 2008 Share Posted April 24, 2008 wasn't this topic started and a few pages long about a week ago? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
The_Decryptor Veteran Posted April 24, 2008 Veteran Share Posted April 24, 2008 Ubuntu. Picasa has Linux support (basically just compiled with Wine) and hardware support (like Plug 'n Play) isn't as bad as some people make it out to be (in my case Ubuntu as as good as Vista in hardware support, and much better than XP) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ToM211 Posted April 24, 2008 Share Posted April 24, 2008 Kubuntu is perfetic. Sorry, it is possibly the worst KDE distro I have even tried. OpenSuse=All. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
MR_Candyman Posted April 24, 2008 Share Posted April 24, 2008 Kubuntu is perfetic. Sorry, it is possibly the worst KDE distro I have even tried.OpenSuse=All. hmm, odd. I find it to be one of the best KDE distros I've used. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
PL_ Veteran Posted April 24, 2008 Veteran Share Posted April 24, 2008 Kubuntu is perfetic. Sorry, it is possibly the worst KDE distro I have even tried.OpenSuse=All. Do you not like *buntu in general or something? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Tews Posted April 24, 2008 Share Posted April 24, 2008 ur gonna puch linux on a 40 yr old??? eek. GL with that... Be careful about being too quick with comments about age vs intelligence/ability!! My parents are in their 80's and dual boot XP/Ubuntu! Im close to 60 and have probably forgot more than you have learned. :p Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bobbytomorow Posted April 24, 2008 Author Share Posted April 24, 2008 Ok, thanks for all of the input guys. I think I'm going to let her try Ubuntu then :) Depends on the camera. You may have no problem with it.Before you switch your mom's OS on her, what have you tried to minimize or eliminate the infection reoccurrence? Have tried an always on piece of software, like Spybot? Have made your mom a limited user instead of an administrator? Have you set up automatic updates and regular spyware/virus scans, perhaps weekly, or even nightly? Just a few suggestions. Thank you for your suggestion, yes I have s&b and etc installed on her box but I would like her to be able to run a robust os without me having to clean it up every second week. She has no clue what a sceduled task is, or what to do if it finds anything. As bad as that sounds thats her user ability in a nutshell, basically "let me surf and get my digital pics developed i dont care about anything else" and I dont blame her, I still remember being a little tot and her teaching my grandpa to use a tv remote :p Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
kyro Posted April 24, 2008 Share Posted April 24, 2008 Let me the radical one and suggest you really RAD distro like Fedora :) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ToM211 Posted April 24, 2008 Share Posted April 24, 2008 Do you not like *buntu in general or something? Ubuntu it's self is ok, the colour scheme is terrible but the support base is huge. I guess it has it's ups and downs just like every other distro. Eitherway I think it's over rated. I used ubuntu alot at first and tried other distro's like mandriva, fedora and puppy but the best I have used yet for my hardware is Opensuse. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
napsterthe Posted April 24, 2008 Share Posted April 24, 2008 Ubuntu is very user firendly so therefore use it. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Knife Party Posted April 24, 2008 Share Posted April 24, 2008 Xubuntu is better, its more lightwight and will fit in perfectly with the 512mb of ram Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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