** Reply to message from Gretchen
Even my father who considers himself fairly computer savvy (meaning he can install and uninstall programs, defrag, and run disk cleanup) is afraid to install Windows. He will call me to come home and do it if he ever gets over the fear that something important that he needs will get deleted.
yup, my husband was like that .. still is really , except at one point when a windows desktop hurled an orb disk at his head. (He'd had the temerity to try to run a backup , and evidently , w2k , I think,wasn't in the mood.) He agreed to try a Linux partition. He'd been noticing the Linux boxen I had setup never rebooted. And he had many times in the past been told by Windows gurus and the MS "support" teams to reboot the computer as the first thing to do when there was a problem. And there always is a problem of some sort or other. So having had his head threatened by the OS's tantrum, he figured anything was better than continuing to use it. ( He'd begun computers w/ OS/2 and only went to windows when things got to be sticky at the end of the public os/2 life span.) I installed Linux for him and he was happily ticking along until a virus took out his windows partition , and as it had changed the fat table he couldn't boot into Linux either .. and since a reinstall was going to be required anyway He decided to make the windows partition as small as possible and to install it w/o a connection to the network , ours as well as the inet. Then plug ethernet cord back in and install linux... all goes along swimmingly until windows once again takes the box down hard. At that point I was not available to reinstall it for him, so he began to install it ( linux ) by himself coming in to ask about anything he was really uncertain of , otherwise just going w/ the defaults. Each time he did that , he'd discover something or other he'd left out of the install , and , having been completely head cased by the time he was spending w/ w2k his solution was to once again delete the partition and reinstall.. after he'd done that about 5 -6 times , and taken notes ( I insisted he do that ) he got to a point where he could actually customize the installation . However, since that week end , he's not needed , nor wanted to reinstall anything again, aside from the odd program or game. BUT; he could do , if he needed or just wanted to reinstall it. And one really great thing , all the documentation for the default install anyone could ever want. It might be worth the agro to actually spend that sort of week end w/ the end user , or small groups of end users . the one absolute thing they get out of it is ; they lose the fear that they will lose something important, or that they will somehow damage the box. I don't know where that thought enters the brains of these folks , but it seems to do w/ most users I've taught ( backups , can you say backups? I thought you could , now do it!) Gil ,realized if he had current backups and something took his box out , he could be back up right at the point he'd left off when the trouble started in no more than one afternoon. For a writer, that's important . Or so I've been told. Now he does backups daily of his work product , and likely weekly for his email , unless there is an important discussion going on . For him , computers aren't really fun, and only mildly interesting, but to get his work done on deadline , and to carry out conferences w/ the collaborators on his articles etc. the computer and especially the net are his lifeline. And best of all , they got me home to the tropics instead of being up in the lands of ice and snow. Next step to the equator ... wheeeeee! What more can anyone ask of any OS ? <VBG> -- j afterthought: Where there's a will, there's a probate