Operating System for the Elderly?

G

Gorilla

Supreme [H]ardness
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Sep 14, 2007
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So long story short, my grandfather has become somewhat disabled in the last couple of years. My mom wants to set him up with a computer so he can at least try to keep his mind busy. The hardware part of it is easy enough. She found one of those children's keyboards with the jumbo keys for him at a garage sale for a couple dollars. We will get him a large monitor so that he can see it better. But then we come to the issue of actually getting him set up with a system that he can work.

I had previously set my grandparents up with our old p4 machine, and my grandfather did relatively well with windows XP. However, as I said he has had some health problems as of late so I figure that the simpler I can make things the better. It used to be that I was over there every couple of days because he had accidentally pushed some random key combo that would delete his menu bar from outlook, or he would delete the firefox shortcut somehow, he would move a window off screen, he would accidentally highlight the email that he was writing and then the next keystroke would replace all of it, etc.

So basically are there any operating systems out there that might help? Some super simple version of linux? Skins that will go over windows? The ideal system would have a desktop with two jumbo buttons, one that says "INTERNET" and another that says "E-MAIL." Are there any programs that I could install in windows and set to run at startup so that he would immediately be presented with only those options?

I mean, windows offers a few settings, but what I really need to be able to do is to provide them with the programs they need (basically just a browser and an email program) and then lock it so that they will only see those two programs and so that they can't change any settings accidentally.

If it were up to me I would just get him cable with every sports channel so that he could watch that all day.... but it's not up to me.

Update: so yeah, it looks like there are a few linux versions that have some promise, such as Eldy. Anyone have any thoughts about these?
 
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If you have a faily recent asus board what about ExpressGate? The pretty much just has a few big buttons for Email/Internet/Media (depending on version)
 
Burke Hamblin said:
Honestly, an iPad with only Safari and email in the tray.
Click to expand...

I don't think you have thoroughly thought out that suggestion. I think I made it fairly clear that they have enough trouble with a mouse and a regular keyboard and a normal sized screen.. Trying to get them to use a 10" touch screen would be terrible. Seriously, it would end up in the trash. Hell, I can't even hand my droid to my mom to show her something without her accidentally touching the screen somewhere and bringing up something else.
 
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Delete all the icons on the desktop, remove anything from the programs group or start menu he doesnt need. Then customize the start menu maybe to have it not display stuff like control panel, or run..etc.

Then maybe put a folder in the startup folder on the programs list with 2 icons IE and Outlook. That way when he starts the computer that folder should open with the 2 short cuts. Or just have them as the only icons on desktop. Maybe set Windows to single click. I find older folks sometime have issues with double clicking. They either dont click fast enough of when they click the first time they hold hte button down and slide the mouse forward.

You could drop the resoution on the monitor, or adjust custom font dps size to increase the font size, and also set to use "large icons" on the desktop. (dont really remember if XP has accessibility options or not)

Not sure of any other skin you could put over windows.
 
The Eldy Linux shell looks fine to me.

It's not hard to make a very simple replacement shell over XP, but it's kind of pointless if the OS doesn't matter since it looks like Eldy should work in his case.
 
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