My son chipped in to help his mother buy a computer for her mother this past Christmas. Sole use of the machine was to email and surf. Son told his mom, have a shop remove Windows and install Linux, if not it’ll get hosed up beyond use within 90 days.
The 2nd week in march it was hosed up with viruses and malware so bad it required an operating system re-install—Linux this time.
There is another option. Download a kiosk distro bootable cd and run that. That way, you can browse all you wish, work with emails, and since the distro will not allow any writing to your drives or modifying your machine in any way, you are quite safe going online and can keep your ‘doze OS.
I personally need to dual-boot on the main machines here because there are certain specialized programs that will only run in the ‘doze environment and the companies involved do not have any linux versions nor do they plan to do so in the future. Sparc, Irix, Unix and H-P machines along with their ‘doze XP offerings, but still no Linux.
*sigh*
Someday.