She uses her computer for playing card games, emailing, web surfing and snapshot photography.
Mom had a “budget” of about $600 - $700 for a new computer, about a year ago. I tried to talk her into a Mac Mini - she already had a monitor and printer - but she would have none of it. We got her a nice HP system instead for $695. We also spent and addition $59.95 on Norton System Care.
Since that time, I have made at least monthly visits to Mom’s to “fix” a computer issue. First her older digital camera wouldn’t be recognized, so we tried using the built in card reader instead. Somehow there was a compatibility issue between how her camera stored pictures and how the computer wanted to read them. The final solution was a new digital camera.
Another issue was her printer. If you are not comfortable digging into the printers utility in Vista, you cannot clean your print heads (Dell printer). This led to many “my printer isn’t printing right” visits. The final solution was a new printer.
Installing the new printer was an issue. She was okay with unpacking it and plugging it in, but when it came to the software installation, she was confused. Frankly, when I was called in to install it, it was a bit intimidating and it wanted to install a bunch of junk that wasn’t needed. Then it seemed to hang up for about 10 minutes in the middle of the install. It did eventually finish, but someone not so patient would have probably rebooted the machine thinking it was hung up, causing even more problems.
There were many other visits - some having to do with automated updates that just stop in the middle of updating, some having to do with the anti-virus software catching some evil code and Mom not knowing what to do - but basically all of the problems could be laid at the feet of those in Redmond. There are just too many problems when you have hundreds of different vendors of hardware and software and no clear, consistent set of interaction rules.
She may have saved a little money up front, but with the time I’ve spent fixing the darn thing, and the money she has had to invest in new hardware, she would have been better off with the Mac Mini.
Proof of this is that many people are very happy with those underpowered netbooks. That need to run on XP since Vista is too much burden. Hardware requirements have hit a ceiling when you see Microsoft putting out an OS Windows7 that has lower hardware requirements than the one that came before. For the first time ever!! I still have high powered home built desktop computers with lots of memory and big LCDs but my low end Compaq laptop does most of what I need and flys on Windows7