I play with Linux. I use Windows.
When I traveled a lot, I did use Puppy on my personal laptop since it booted so quickly. Now the personal laptop stays at home (traveling with two laptops wasn’t fun) and I use a tablet for my personal travel device.
If you used windows XP ,try Lubuntu ,very little difference between the 2 ,well Lubuntu is 10 times faster and all the software is FREE and when Lubuntu updates it updates all software installed when windows just updates itself .Download the ISO of Lubuntu ,burn it to a CD/DVD and boot computer from it to try it out ,it will not install it unless you pick install
Sums it up - when they get away from the need to use the command prompt to "tweak" things, they will have my full attention.