For Christmas I gave my dad a low-mileage Windows laptop that I had purchased from work as excess inventory. We delivered all of the sold computers with a basic Windows XP Pro image without an anti-virus or productivity applications. It had been a while since I had prepped a computer for personal use before and it's always something of a balance between reliability and functionality in selecting your software ensemble but I was pretty happy with what I set up for my dad.
Before anything, I of course did all the Windows updates and being a Lenovo (previously IBM), I downloaded their system updater. Between updates for the two, it probably took a good 3 hours before I could install anything interesting.
I started with anti-virus. Seeing as how I didn't want to spend any money and I've been quite happy with ClamAV for Linux and Macs, I got it for Windows for my dad's computer.
As people who know me and my philosophy on personal computing, one of my biggest complaints about Windows is the relative lack of an elegant free or inexpensive suite to do the neat stuff that many home computer users want to do outside of mail and web. The best suite of applications I've found thus far is the Google Pack. Google Pack includes Picasa for photo editing and organizing, Skype for A/V voice over IP (VoIP) free calling, Google Talk for IM, Acrobat reader, Google Earth, Google Desktop, optionally Star Office, and other stuff. With this suite someone can get quite a bit more substance from the Web and the applications are all really easy to use to find/learn stuff, communicate, and manage photos. One of the other nice things is that by getting the stuff through Google Pack, it will take care of updates for all the products
For an office productivity suite, Microsoft Office is the logical and prevailing choice, but it's far from free or inexpensive. Alternatives include the aforementioned Star Office, OpenOffice.org, Google Apps, and other lesser known options. I had a license that I wasn't using for Microsoft Office so I put it on my dad's computer and it's really my preferred productivity suite, be it Windows or Mac.
Lots of people like being able to generate PDFs so I included a nice bit of open-source software for that purpose called PDF Creator off of sourceforge.net. It's very lightweight and far faster than the full version of Adobe Acrobat, and it's free!
Just because I don't like to be tied to one browser, I also install Firefox and Safari for Windows. I do like IE7 for functionality far better than its predecessors because it finally added tabbed browsing and integrated RSS feeds, although its implementation of the latter seems almost Beta-like.
I would have been a big proponent of Google's Desktop Search a year ago but since then Microsoft came out with their own Windows Desktop Search application and it works wonderfully. It indexes quickly, is easy to use, and allows you to index network drives as well.
For media management I put iTunes on the computer. I know a lot of people, particularly Winamp users don't like iTunes because the default nature is to reorganize and rearrange your music folders. After I spent quite a bit of time with iTunes and began to see how it works and understand the logic I grew to accept it and am just fine with it. On my media computer I did tell it to NOT copy the files to the iTunes directory because there simply isn't room and I do want to manage the directory structure on that one myself but for most basic music users it works fine with its default settings. It's one of those things where it makes assumptions that it knows better than you but the reality is that for most people it probably does.
My dad is one of those guys who has managed to sign up for every mail and IM service possible and has friends and contacts on just about all of them so I installed Trillian which has a free basic version and a paid full-featured version. Besides that, AOL's client is a pig and loaded with adware. I also put Skype on his computer via the Google Pack. I like a couple of things about Skype, in particular it's the only Windows A/V client that works reliably. I can't begin to recall the number of hours my staff and I have wrestled with various Windows clients trying to get video chat working reliably and even if we could, it would be a support nightmare. On the other hand, Skype works elegantly and easily out of the box after the initial setup.
The only thing I didn't do was set up a mail client for him. I'd like to see him use Gmail because I do and there are some nice collaboration functions with it but mail is a very personal choice.
After making sure everything was updated and only the right things were launching at startup, I gave my dad the laptop. He got it last night and was tremendously excited and thankful. I guess both hinges had broken on the old Dell I gave him a few years ago but he still propped it up on his lap with the screen resting on his legs and used it several hours a week. There might be some improvements in quality of life for him with his low-mileage Lenovo T60 now!
No comments:
Post a Comment