[rbanffy]

Why would ChromeOS complicate tasks like page setup? It seems printing is somewhat different (not sure - I haven't used a Cr-48 yet) but it can't possibly be so complicated my mother (an archetypal 75 year-old lady) would have problems. About a month ago, I set her up with a USB printer (I took away my networked printer), Ubuntu detected it immediately when plugged. No driver download, no nothing. It all just worked.

Anyway, if page setup and connecting external screens are your worst problems, consider yourself very lucky. Most of us have to deal with the occasional malware infection (luckily, I don't). The horror stories are often amusing.

[kenjackson]

Fortunatley, I've only had one malware infection amongst friends and family, and it was on the Amiga -- where I'd inadvertantly infected my neighborhood with an infected disk. Felt like a jerk.

I ran w/o any virus protection until about 2005 on a PC and never got any malware. Lucky? Maybe, but I see so little malware amongst "my users" that I wonder where the ruckus comes from. In any case, I do now have everyone on MS Security Essentials.

ChromeOS doesn't complicate page setup, but it printing. With printing you need to have a "server" computer hooked up to the printer. Now there are issues around the other computer being turned on, and diagnosing issues at the host computer rather than at the machine their doing the print job from. Basically take every problem you have today, but then add another computer in the middle.

[rbanffy]

In my extended social circle there are two groups with observably higher computer problem frequency: the teens and the seniors. The teens are heavy gamers, prefer Windows and frequent all the worst places of the net. The seniors exchange an astonishing volume of PowerPoint presentations and click on every link they get by e-mail. Both groups have their computers rebuilt ever 6 months or so. Not only because of malware, but performance issues that appear to make the machines unbearably slow (maybe due to installing two or three smiley-making extensions to their IM clients)