Computer for 75yr old gentleman

[Dawg]

A neighbour of a friend wants a new computer as his 2 year old one is 'too big, and doesn't work properly'.
It's the size that seems important, other than that all he wants to do is word processing, (in Norwegian!), and says he is not bothered by email, internet or anything else.

Sooo, I was thinking ultra small form: Acer Aspire Revo R3600 Atom 2GB 160GB.
Any opinions please? (He's chaffing at the bit, but I want to put him off until next week so he can have Windows 7, but he's coming to see me this afternoon.)

 

[3 MORE YEARS]

That should be plenty for him, if he is just going to use it as a word processor.

If he just needs Word Processing, are you sure you want to put him on Windows 7? Why not buy him an second hand XP machine for under £100. Take my word for it it will is enough power for intensive users in an office environment. As he is old, just make sure the monitor is decent size.

 

[KM-Tiger]

Screen size and ability to easily enlarge fonts might be an issue if his eyesight isn't what is was. Crikey even I have to enlarge fonts sometimes! I'm sure those young policemen are making them all smaller.

Not suggesting you go open source, but this presentation gives some pointers of things to consider:

http://www.slideshare.net/drajt/desktop-adapted-for-dad-presentation

Will he need a Norwegian keyboard?

 

hold out on the windows 7, if we learnt anything from Vista wait months for all the bugs to be fixed.

 

[Dawg]

Thanks.
Scoots: money doesn't seem too much of a problem. He was initially going for a £1000 gaming machine on the advice of his neighbour's spotty Herbert teenager.

KMT: Thanks for the Dad-vid link. I can see I'm now going to end up customising his box...

EB: Windows 7: good idea to hold off. I'll get an upgrade package thrown in if possible, and wait a bit. (Although there is a school of thought that thinks W7 is Vista with the bugs removed...)

 

i should listen to my own advice, i love new gadgets and would love to get the most out of w7, will wait though

 

[vvaannmmaann]

"Computer for 75yr old gentleman"?
Sounds fair.Would you take my 79yr old Mother in exchange for one?

 

[Bondy_UK]

Will you be building it for him or just advising on which one to buy?

Simply because if you would build it and he wants the smallest possible size he can, I recommend getting a Pico-ITX board/builder kit. These things are tiny and run between 500MHz and 1.6GHz with 2GB RAM.

Originally by VIA (they love to beat Intel at being the first to market the most compact designs), Intel finally 2 years lately released an Atom Pico-ITX board - They are releasing a dual core Atom N280 Pico-ITX board but im not sure its on the market yet.

The VIA board was costly and it was thought the Atom board would undercut it, however as it turns out the Atom one seems to be 3x the expected price and the VIA is now half of what it was. So while the Atom would have given much better performance, for the price the VIA will probably do exactly what the gentleman wants it to.



Wait till the Mobile-ITX boards are out... they are crazy small!!

 

[ORDERED WEB]

Not a laptop. get one of the small footprint PC's/mac's. and invest in good solid keyboard and mouse. It is the keyboard and mouse choice that will make the difference. It will need to be solid, capable of taking abuse, and ergonomically correct

The next thing is a nice big bright screen

One of the issues with seniors is where the PC is placed.. if you hide it away, it will never get used

Consider something that uses the TV screen (if it is suitable)

 

[K.C.Leblanc]

This sounds daft but is he still using a CRT? If so then selling him a TFT and rebuilding his exisiting PC might be enough.

If not I wouldn't persoanly go for Acer, they don't have a great reputation for support. The HP DC7900 Ultra Slim with their monitor/stand jobby is very neat. Or you could go over to the dark side and get him a Mac.

If you're going to be 'looking after it' you might want to bung logmein on there.

 

One of the issues with seniors is where the PC is placed.. if you hide it away, it will never get used

He is old not bleeding blind.

Cause one could always get him a giger counter so he could find it in the mornings.

Earl

 

[KM-Tiger]

He is old not bleeding blind.

Quite.

But there is a serious point here about where the monitor is placed, as someone of that age will almost certainly need reading glasses, and it's quite hard to get everything in just the right place to be able to read the screen and any papers on a physical desktop without needing to change glasses or crick your neck. I've recently lowered my monitors (and wish I could get them lower) to make that work for me with varifocals.

 

[Tom McClelland]

hold out on the windows 7, if we learnt anything from Vista wait months for all the bugs to be fixed.

I've been using Windows 7 on a production PC for the last 6 months. First the RC, then the RTM. I haven't had a single problem with it. It works beautifully, it installed first time with no fuss, it starts up rapidly, it recognised all of my devices. It is signficantly faster and smoother, IMHO, than either XP or Vista.

If I had a choice between Vista on a new PC and W7 I'd take W7 every time. I'm *still* getting appalling performance and bugs on my company's Vista PCs.

 

[3 MORE YEARS]

I wouln't woryy about Windows 7. Microsoft have got it spot on this time.

 

good to know tom thanks.

 

[livetutor]

I think you want a bigger screen - and usually bigger screen = bigger keys. If he's word processing a lot, there is nothing more annoying than tiny keys

 

[Tej]

LOL.. Dawg has probably sorted him out.. as meeting was yesterday.

Anyways.. gent is 75 years old.. and knows what he wants. He wants to use word for writing letters etc.. in Norwegian!!.. How many of you "youngsters" can do that?

You guys tend to write anybody off just because they are over 65?.. Earl excepted of course.. and hopefully me too