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I think all the people recommending Chromebooks or Linux are entirely missing the point. Those are only viable alternatives within small niche uses for people who literally only use email and facebook. It's the 80/20 fallacy. 80% of the people only use 20% of the features, but for each person in that 80% they use a slightly different 20% subset. It's the same here. Most people only use a very small subset of the internet, and most things they do would work fine on a Chromebook, but each of them has that one thing they just can't live without that only works on Windows. I have this exact problem with several family members PCs who come to me regularly with messed up machines. It's not just old people either. One problem person for me is a 10 year old who always insists that all he downloaded was just that one minecraft mod and it was definitely a safe mod, honest, because he downloaded found it on google, or he saw stampy using it on youtube, oh and a java update because the mod says it needed it, oh and forge, and optifine, and, and, and... He's loosely tech savvy, but in a way that doesn't make him any safer, he still gets his computer into a mess. He's not going to switch to a Chromebook. No minecraft, and none of the other games his peers are into. (On a related note, the minecraft modding community is one of the most vile den of scam-mongery I've ever had the misfortune to stumble into) The older people all require MS Word/Excel (And don't tell me LibreOffice is a replacement, it's not even close if you expect file compatibility with other people who use MS products). Windows only plugins for specific websites, that's another one that is hopefully getting much rarer, but I still do see from time to time. I've tried setting up restricted accounts and keeping the admin account password secret, but it always eventually has to get given out. Last time it was because their son needed to do submit his homework on the schools website, but the submission processes required a Windows only plugin which needed admin access to install. They were all panicked because I hadn't been answering my phone and his homework was due the next day. After that I gave up and stopped using restricted accounts. I've tried disk imaging software, but it's typically a lot more work than it's worth with the images quickly getting out of date and needing redoing with new versions constantly. This is a big big problem that I just don't have a good solution for. |