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sleepy
We got her a simple eMachine computer since she doesn't need a dual-core processor for email and searching the web and writing stuff. I wiped off Vista and put Ubuntu 9.10 Jaunty Jackalope on it. With 3g of memory, GNU/Linux flies on this machine.
This 76 year old woman who never used a computer or even a typewriter in her life was able to copy pictures from her camera's sd card and use f-spot to browse through images and print out a picture herself after I showed her how to.
My being patient and her being patient helped in tutoring her in computer usage.
From purchase to working installation was one hour.
To specifically configure it for her was one and a half hours.
To show her everything was 4 hours. Mainly showing her how a mouse worked and keyboard combinations and the menu layout. For those who haven't grown up with this stuff it can be overwhelming.
The most surprising thing to me was that her arthritis made it harder for her to use the mouse and easier to use the keyboard. I really thought it would have been the other way around.
I suggested that now that she has a computer, she needs to get familiar with it on her own. I suggested that she power it on, do 1 to 3 things at most, then stop so she doesn't confuse commands, do something else then come back to it later.
She's really happy with it and my wife and I are glad we could help her with this.
Next task is to get her phone line hooked to the internet. We didn't want to overwhelm her too much.
