My deepest apologies. It wasn't meant to be insulting, but on re-reading, I can clearly see how it would be.

edit: By way of explanation of where that came from, when my parents found themselves in a similar situation of "slow computer", and had gotten tired of the nuke-and-repave route, they asked me what to do. They were clearly candidates for running Linux -- there's nothing they did that required proprietary software (with one exception, which my dad now runs in a virtual machine). Yet, I told them to buy a Mac, because I didn't want to be their support person. They're very happy with the choice.

My elderly mother in-law finally gave in to the march of technology -- her G3 PowerMac running OS9 was just too far behind the times to open modern attachments or browse modern sites.

So I gave her an old Pentium-4, and put Ubuntu Linux on it. We tweaked various GNOME desktop settings to make the appearance/behaviour as similar as possible to her former OS9 desktop. She couldn't be happier, and the only time I get support calls is, well.. none so far.

Seven months and counting.

PS: She's also now enjoying using it to watch DVDs and videos that we supply her with. She'd never used a DVD player or watched a digital video before this.