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Comment by busterarm | Hacker News Reader

I'm in this situation too.

We're at an impasse now too where my mom wants a new laptop. She doesn't want to learn anything new (Mac OS) and both she and I don't want to deal with Windows 8+. I'm skeptical about just installing Windows 7 on a newer laptop (...driver/hardware support).

If I could get her to switch to Mac (she's in her 70s), I could set her up with a non-admin user account and set it up easily so that I can securely do remote support. The funny thing is that she would probably do it if not for my brother, who does support for a living and doesn't want to learn to fix Macs...smh

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Windows 7 is going to be absolutely fine. If it's what she's used to, and you have the license and media, just go ahead.

And something like TeamViewer does the remote support nicely.

I'm all for Linux otherwise, but in this use case I'd let old people use whatever keeps them going.

Yeah, it's just an insecure mess.

She always makes a mess of Windows machines. If her first instinct weren't always to call my older brother for help, I'd have gotten her the Mac ages ago.

Well, perhaps it would be good to give her a non-admin account to Windows? The same approach you'd do with a Mac, but leaving her with a familiar UI.

Privilege escalation, even with UAC at its strictest, is trivial on Windows with the malware that's floating around these days.

I worked full time for 5 of the last 6 years on Windows malware research. Windows is a swiss-cheese joke of an operating system that won't progress because of a(n at this point pathological) need for 20 years of backwards compatibility. Microsoft: make use of that XP mode VM and extend that trend forwards, you fools.

Perhaps so, but at least it would keep some of the malware out.

Another option would be to put her regular use to a VM that you control (remotely) and can restore to a clean state at any time...

I'd like to see some kind of way to lock the system for older folks. I'm tired of troubleshooting my dad's computer. He doesn't even do so much as adding bookmarks, his machine exclusively browses the web.

I'd like to get everything he needs installed and lock out modifications. Needs cookies obviously, but not much else.

Somehow he manages to have video player issues in every single browser that I can't figure out. He has to watch youtube in chrome, live streams in firefox, etc. It's really dumb. Buying him a chromecast improved it some, though, by avoiding it.

Such limitations are of course possible. Perhaps you should look up what you can achieve by running secpol.msc.

(Myself, I find that model complex and unintuitive, being used to the Unix way, but everything has its learning curve.)

I bought my mom a Chromebook under similar circumstances. She absolutely loves it, and had zero difficulty switching, whereas she was previously even uncomfortable turning laptops on or off.

same situation here. I convinced my mother to just get an Android based tablet and ditch the laptop. This seems to be working better for her & me :)

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