Last night I went to help out a friend with a computer problem. A little information, about once a month he calls me to tell me his computer has slowed down to an unbearable state. I fully know that it’s probably infested with spyware and viruses. He calls me once a month and usually he just wants me to do a fresh reload of windows. I made this easier by imaging his drive and all I do is backup his data, restore the image, and then restore his data. This time he wanted me to try and save it.

After messing with it for an hour I had a lot of it cleaned up, but the system was just really slow. Windows XP Pro, 1Gig RAM, P4 2.2 GHz, this should not be that slow. I gave him the option that we could just restore his image and I would be out of there within the hour, or we could continue removing the crap. See he is an avid Porn surfer. He is also very “click happy”, let’s just say there isn’t much on a website he doesn’t click or download. With that said the big question, “How can I keep this from happening.” I didn’t have a real good answer for him. I’ve tried different virus scanners, firewalls, spyware programs and the like. He is too gullible when it comes to the internet. Then it struck me, he only surfs the web, email, newsgroups and downloading pictures from his digital camera. I had a solution all along.

What if I installed Linux Mint on his system? I had to win him over, so I got out my laptop. I have Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon installed as the only operating system. I choose mint for him because of the Multimedia he uses. I set him up in the next room to play around with it. He actually liked it. He asked me the usual Linux newbie stuff like where certain things were, how to get here or there. I told him I would make him a deal. If he tried Linux for 1 week he would get our visit free. If he didn’t like it I we re-image is hard drive and setup his windows stuff. He gave me permission to install it. The install was real easy, no hiccups. All I had to load were the nVidia video drivers. I setup desktop effects through compiz for him and migrated his data. I stayed with him for about an hour to make sure he understood the basics. So far so good no phone calls today. If he gets a virus now, I will be REALLY SURPRISED.

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