Mac Advice: Getting my grandfather on email
 

At 86 he's still going strong with local politics, school, church, Knights of Columbus...you name it. He's missing out on a lot of email communication and wants to get on the web.

I have an old G3 Blue and White with OS9 that's as stable as can be and won't ever have any upgrade messages and certainly no viruses. With Outlook and Word, he should be fine forever, but it's slightly slow and he'll be using a dial-up/modem to access the web until I can get cable set up.

Should I set him up with that or go with a newer OSX Mac, maybe a notebook, that is overall faster, would have wireless capability, etc. but would also ask him to install new software now and again...stuff that will more confuse than help.

Pros and cons of each in your experience?

My kids use a similar iMac running debian.

How much memory do you have? You can pick up a couple of PC-133 256mb sticks to give it 512mb ram, makes it a very serviceable machine...

it's got 192MB. thanks for the tip on the RAM, that could do it for him.

I'd avoid the old B/W box.

The apps on it are no longer being maintained and you may find he has more issues due to lack of feature set/compatibility with the "modern" stuff on the other end.

Personally I'd opt for a used box,

Buy and Sell Used Macs - We Have Used Macs, Refurbished Apple Desktops, Apple Notebooks, Peripherals - Mac of All Trades

Apple Intel Core Duo/1.83GHz 13.3" MacBook - Mac of All Trades

Refurbished Apple Macbook Intel Core 2 Duo 2.0 GHz 1GB 80GB Combo 13 inch Refurbished Used Macbook Apple

Or a new Mac Mini.

The software updates are really not bad.

Just set it to check monthly and it'll only be an issue 12 times a year.

agree on compatibility.

used iMacs are crazy cheap on CL.

thanks Scott.

Go with the MAC