A lil' present

[stevo1210]

My near 80 year old grandma has decided to embark on learning how to use the internet. My grandpa is quite fluent with the internet but he chooses to not let grandma use his computer that I gave him last year.

Anyway, I decided to get something dirt cheap for grandma so she could check emails and read the online news. She wanted a laptop so she could watch TV and look after the dog at the same time... and so I got her a laptop.
In all seriousness, I didn't even think this through twice when I bought her the laptop on eBay... literally the auction was closing in a minute or so and I decided to just bid for it. Quick peek here: http://www.ebay.com.au/itm/160791667...#ht_500wt_1413

Anyway, I got her an older Dell C640 with a Pentium 4 CPU. Battery is shot but whole laptop works fine and physically okay looking (not that grandma cares).

Grandma will be using this laptop at home, so I won't bother with the battery replacement unless she tells me to do so.

It's got 256MB of RAM... which is quite low for today's standards... so I'll pop in another 256MB to make 512MB.

Not sure if it has wireless card in there or not, but it does allow for one but I'm not sure if I can just grab any mini-PCI card, connect the ready made antenna cables and then put it in to call it a day?
I must stress the wireless bit as I did set up a nice wireless set up throughout the home.

In terms of the OS, I understand it has XP on there now but not sure what service pack... would SP2 still be okay for today? (less strain on RAM).

Other than that, I figured I'll need to buy grandma a little portable desk thing as well so she can sit on the lounge and watch TV while using the laptop to check emails!

I can already picture her using this laptop... slowly typing word by word and giving me a phone call every time she forgets how to close a program.

[ratdude747]

Re: A lil' present

Just install Sp3 on it... You'll thank me later.

(You could also try ubuntu with Unity 2d, I hear for newcomers its a great GUI).

[ratdude747]

Re: A lil' present

Just install Sp3 on it... You'll thank me later.

(You could also try ubuntu with Unity 2d, I hear for newcomers its a great GUI).

[stevo1210]

Re: A lil' present

Will SP3 run okay on 512MB of RAM (not that grandma notices speed anyway). Anti-virus, yay or nay? I know old people can get protective and I can just see in my head that grandma might go out to a store and buy antivirus because the salesman said so. :/
I'm planning to install something nice and light like nod32 just so my grandma won't buy anti-virus!

[retiredcaps]

Re: A lil' present

I'm planning to install something nice and light like nod32 just so my grandma won't buy anti-virus!

I use Panda Cloud AV which is free and lightweight. I suggest setting up Grandma as a "guest" user instead of the default "adminstrator". You will avoid a lot of headaches.

Also I agree with momaka on all the points below except the AV (point #1)

https://www.badcaps.net/forum/showpo...0&postcount=10

[retiredcaps]

Re: A lil' present

Just because Panda Cloud AV is free doesn't mean it is poor quality. See the first 2 blog posts at

http://blog.cloudantivirus.com/

[RJARRRPCGP]

Re: A lil' present

Will SP3 run okay on 512MB of RAM (not that grandma notices speed anyway).

Yes. As long as anti-virus don't hog it.

[retiredcaps]

Re: A lil' present

Yes. As long as anti-virus don't hog it.

With Panda Cloud AV, XP Home SP3, and all of momaka's suggestion, I get about 195K used during a fresh install.

[retiredcaps]

Re: A lil' present

Also I agree with momaka on all the points below except the AV (point #1)

https://www.badcaps.net/forum/showpo...0&postcount=10

For point #2 above, if you turn off automatic updates, Grandma will have to do a manual update every 2nd tuesday. For friends and family, I just leave automatic updates on. I would rather get the patches rather than save a few bytes of memory.

[momaka]

Re: A lil' present

I have the Latitude C600 (850 MHz Pentium 3). It's a pretty decent and sturdy laptop. Also very easy to service, just like the Dell Latitude D series. The only downfall on mine is that it has only 1 USB port, and it's v1.1. It also runs miserably hot (especially now in the summer, when it's close to 27C/80F in my room) - at least the C600 series are. Not sure about yours. On mine, the CPU fan won't turn on until CPU is burning hot. RAM and NB are also like that. I have 2 more C600's and they run hot as well, so it's not a unique issue with my laptop. Don't worry though, these laptops won't break any time soon - they use leaded solder. I'm probably the 3rd, 4th, or maybe even 5th owner of my laptop.
Another thing that I like about it is that it has all sorts of legacy ports, including PS/2 - makes it easy to hook up an old "clicky" keyboard and serial mouse .

Mine has 512 MB of RAM, 20 GB, PCMCIA wireless B card, and the original Dell battery which still holds a charge for 1 hour or so on average (1.5 hours if just reading and typing documents or 30 minutes if watching YouTube or doing CPU-intensive stuff). Currently it's my school laptop and I'm using it to type this post ATM.

Windows XP SP2 should be fine. That's what I'm running. No problems whatsoever. The installation picked up all of the drivers for everything. The only drivers I had to provide was for the wireless B card.

With all of my tweaks, it boots up at just over 80 MB of RAM. That leaves me with 400 and odd MB of free RAM + additional space on the page file.

Just install Sp3 on it... You'll thank me later.

Both SP2 and SP3 will work fine. SP3 may use more RAM, though. Personally, I don't see anything "must have" in SP3 to justify the extra RAM and HDD space usage. SP3 has just as many security holes as SP2, and that's because the XP kernel is getting a bit old.

The best thing to do is to set stevo's grandma's account as a "user" only or even guest, as retiredcaps suggested. If you go that route, make sure to create another admin account for yourself and make it hidden.

For point #2 above, if you turn off automatic updates, Grandma will have to do a manual update every 2nd tuesday. For friends and family, I just leave automatic updates on. I would rather get the patches rather than save a few bytes of memory.

If the computer is running fine and stable, AU are nearly useless. Security patches won't do crap if grandma decides to click on a link in a scam email that tells her she won $1 000 000. AU can also considerably slow down your computer on start-up (up to a minute or even more if it hasn't been updated or turned on in a few days). Considering the speed of that CPU, it's guaranteed to get stuck at 100% until AU are finally done.

Your best bet against your grandma getting the computer infected is:
1) install FF with Adblock and No-Script
2) install Spyware Blaster and make sure to set it to block all malicious cookies and websites for both FF and IE (in case your grandma opens it by mistake)
3) enable Windows Firewall
4) Install a light-weight AV - yes, I actually do put AV software on computers, but that's only when I know the user is/are not very computer-literate.

Optional things to do:
1) Remove anything from the start menu and desktop you don't want her to mess with
2) Install TeamViewer6, set up a login and pass for that computer and put an icon to it on her desktop. Write down the login and pass and keep that with you. If your grandma ever calls you and wants you to come do something for her, just tell her to double click on that icon. If you have another computer with internet and TeamViewer, you won't have to go to her house or spend 1 hour on the phone trying to explain something.

With Panda Cloud AV, XP Home SP3, and all of momaka's suggestion, I get about 195K used during a fresh install.

Sounds a bit high. What's the memory usage without Panda? # of running processes?

[Scenic]

Re: A lil' present

2) Install TeamViewer6, set up a login and pass for that computer and put an icon to it on her desktop. Write down the login and pass and keep that with you. If your grandma ever calls you and wants you to come do something for her, just tell her to double click on that icon. If you have another computer with internet and TeamViewer, you won't have to go to her house or spend 1 hour on the phone trying to explain something.

Damn good idea, but Teamviewer 6 is outdated
They're at V7 already (which still works on XP, so no worries)

For those reading the thread who don't know what Teamviewer is: Think VNC, just without having to mess with opening ports for it to work. It also has additional features like a built-in chat, optional VPN between the 2 computers, a "File Box" to transfer files etc. ...

[stevo1210]

Re: A lil' present

2) Install TeamViewer6, set up a login and pass for that computer and put an icon to it on her desktop. Write down the login and pass and keep that with you. If your grandma ever calls you and wants you to come do something for her, just tell her to double click on that icon. If you have another computer with internet and TeamViewer, you won't have to go to her house or spend 1 hour on the phone trying to explain something.

Oh thanks for that tip. I'll install that on both grandma and grandpa's computer. I literally just came back from a 60km round trip going there to help grandpa log into gmail. :-/

[retiredcaps]

Re: A lil' present

Sounds a bit high. What's the memory usage without Panda? # of running processes?

Without Panda Cloud AV, I have 18 or 19 processes and XP3 uses about 98MB. Panda Cloud AV adds about 100MB at peak. In the process window, it shows 23MB being for PSANhost.exe and PSUNmain.exe.

I *think* when I tried Avira or avast (I can't remember) free, it used about 40MB. I also tried Immunet Cloud 3.0 and it was the lowest RAM usage at around 30MB, but I'll give up a some DRAM for a "better" AV.

[shovenose]

Re: A lil' present

I prefer LogMeIn over TeamViewer personally...
Also, Avast! rather than Panda AV...

[severach]

Re: A lil' present

Anyone that can read can have me in an installed Team Viewer in less than 15 minutes. It's 3 minutes if they have some Internet-fu.

Installing LogMeIn is too difficult.

Can you read me the blue numbers?

[stevo1210]

Re: A lil' present

The C640 came today by parcel. Very nice and clean laptop overall. Everything seems to work nicely. However, the hinges are a tad weak as this is an older laptop... but it's not bad, still usable to me... I'll see if grandma wants them replaced for $15 or not. No inbuilt wireless, so I will be buying a $3 Broadcom based mini-PCI wireless B/G card off eBay so grandma can go "wireless". Oh, did I mention that it has 512MB of RAM and not 256MB like what the seller said. :P SCORE!

[momaka]

Re: A lil' present

Oh, did I mention that it has 512MB of RAM and not 256MB like what the seller said. :P SCORE!

Nice!
Should be plenty for grandma.
I rarely run out of RAM, even when I have my usual stuff open, which is more or less 15+ FF 3.6 Windows open, a bunch of Adobe PDF documents (some are quite large), Word, Excel, Photoshop 7, 2-4 Explorer windows, and some other small programs.

[Scenic]

Re: A lil' present

^ I switched to Sumatra PDF from the bloated Adobe crap. Sooo much faster.

There's also a "useful bug" in versions 0.5 and earlier, which allowed printing documents where this would normally be blocked (no printing flag set in the PDF)

The website is pure eye cancer though..

[stevo1210]

Re: A lil' present

Um. are you guys sure Panda cloud AV is a "light" AV? I trial tested it on my Sony Vaio UX handheld with a 1.2GHz Core Solo CPU and 512MB of RAM on XP SP3 and it became a slug, even with over 200MB of free RAM according to task manager.
Basically I can see the HDD light on all the time! However once uninstalled my handheld was fast again.

[lti]

Re: A lil' present

Microsoft Security Essentials is supposed to be "light," but it made my computer so slow that it was unusable. Avast 6 was good, but I haven't used version 7 yet and the official download link leads to Download.com. The latest version of Norton has little effect on performance, but the detection rate still sucks.

In my experience, the best way to not get a virus is to use a custom Hosts file and to never use Google Images.