Comment by steve1977
2 days ago
> Many of my Windows memories from those days were of running Spybot Search and Destroy for friends and family.
I remember the regular cleaning sessions I had to do for my mother. Which stopped once I got her a Mac mini.
Windows XP was the point when I decided to move my mom to Mac first, then to Linux. She adapted really quickly to Ubuntu.
I decided the same, but for myself.
I liked Windows 2000.
XP was a bloated mess to me (in 2001) and I switched to Linux, and started upgrading a discarded PowerMac I'd been given until it was usefully able to run the shiny new Mac OS X.
10.0, 10.1, 10.2 started to get stable and quick enough to be useful for some tasks, 10.3 sealed the deal and became my full-time desktop.
Every week I'd spend a good chunk of my time with her cleaning her computer. It got massively worse when the Windows machine was hooked up to a broadband modem (with a half-decent firewall). Moving her to a Mac improved things a lot, and moving her to Linux allowed me to put her machine in my homelab monitoring systems and to manage it remotely when needed.
From that moment on, we could spend a lot more time talking, watching her TV shows, cooking. It's a quality of life issue.