This past week I turned over a new computer (mentioned earlier) to my folks. They were visiting me and brought over their old computer. I setup network sharing between the two computers and copied over whatever I could think of.

Of course I forgot some things. Apparently they had a pretty extensive contact book in Outlook Express and I had not copied it over and imported it into Windows Live Mail. Other than that the transition does not seem to have been too bad. I was unable to transfer, from their old computer, their TV tuner card so I have bought them a USB stick that does the same thing.

As I worried in an earlier post that the interface differences between Windows 7 and Windows XP would confuse the folks and this has, in fact, happened. The Outlook Express replacement, Windows Live Mail, does some things differently. The most egregious difference is the asinine use of the Alt key to bring down the file menu(s). Whose brainchild is this? What a truly terrible idea.

The most useful suggestion I received (back when I was soliciting suggestions for this computer) was to purchase a subscription to GoToMyPC.com. What a time saver that has been. I can simply remotely connect to their desktop and perform tasks for them. Plus I can see what is happening instead of constantly having to ask, "What is going on?" or "What are you seeing?"

It's been awhile but tonight I booted up my parent's new machine and installed much of the software I said I was going to install in my previous post.

I am a bit concerned that the interface to Windows 7 is so significantly different from XP that my parents will be lost (at least for a short while). Since I don't run Windows I was very surprised at what looks like a fairly radical shift in some of the design (although there are some familiar elements). Hopefully the software I have chosen to place on their computer will just work. My confidence level (based entirely on past experience) is currently very low. I was hedging on purchasing a gotomypc.com subscription but I now think it wil be very useful. Especially for the short term. Once the machine is up and running at my parent's home I assume Dell support will be able to take over from there.

I will be doing some initial work on a computer I bought for my parents. My goal is to install only the software that they need and that that software be as unintrusive as possible.

I bought them a Dell computer with some pretty decent specs. At work I have been soliciting recommendations for essential software that meets the criteria I mentioned above.

SUPPORT: I may be purchasing a subscription to gotomypc. My intention is to use this subscription to provide technical support should they need it. Beyond that I got them the three year warranty that comes with Dell technical support.

ANTI-VIRUS: I was told that Microsoft Security Essentials was a very good, free product. It updates itself automatically and doesn't cripple the performance of the computer (which I gather some other anti-virus software does).

DEFRAGMENTATION: Apparently Windows 7 still runs on a filesystem that can easily become fragmented. I will be placing DeFraggler on the computer. Once again this is software that runs in the background and will do what is needed without bothering the user.

BACKUP: For backup I am still deciding between Mozy and carbonite.

PHOTO ORGANIZATION: I was running a Gallery2 installation on my VPS and used it to host my pictures and pictures my parents took. Initially I had wanted my entire extended family to use it, but that never really worked out. I finally realized that running this server was ridiculous considering all of the high quality (and free!) image hosting sites. I decided on Google's Picasa Web which is an on-line service that integrates well with their Picasa image organization software. It also supports Linux along with Windows.