As I survey what I need to get done before this weekend, the need to scratch one of my PCs to take along to my Father's house to potentially replace his spyware/virus riddled current PC looms large. As a 27 year computer professional, veteran of many machines built from parts, and numerous scratch installs, I'm sure I CAN get to the finish line, but am disgusted by the effort.
All my 78 year old completely non-technologist Dad needs is "email and browser capability". Somehow he managed to find some Spyware, probably with a great big button that said "click here to protect your computer", and the infection began. A previous trip to install Spybot cleaned off thousands of instances, but even though the machine became useable again, the "rot" was apparently permanent, and the best guess is that it is time for a scratch install now since it keeps eating his Internet provider password, and fails to connect.
Given the potential difficulty of that, it seems easier to create a clean machine here, copy over the favorites, email files, and very tiny application to hook up to his Internet provider once I get there, and "be on the road". It can be done, but in these days of $70 1GB SD cards it seems amazing that a machine can't have a non-volatile copy of a enough OS to provide Browser and Email capability without the need to drag a complete machine to Wisconsin.
If only I had "a little time" (weeks? couple months?) I could manage to build myself a very simple Linux Kernel, set it up with Firefox and Thunderbird, and configure it so that it ONLY exposed those functions to my father. How many older folks (and in fact even younger folks) only REALLY need that much computing power in many cases? It seems like such a solution must be done already, but at least from a SHORT Google search of the net it did not materialize and thus I Blog my lament and dream of a better computing life.
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