What to install on a windows XP computer for unsophisticated users

Question

I volunteered to set up a laptop computer with Windows XP for my son's second grade teacher. I installed windows from scratch (to make sure it's clean). I'm trying to create a setup that will keep her running without issues for the longest possible time. Also (since it's not a very powerful machine) I would like to make sure she has only the minimum needed, and no junk running in the background. She obviously doesn't know too much about maintaining it. I added antivirus and antispyware and scheduled to run automatically at night. What tool or utils should I set up? Any other suggestions?

Answer 1

Maybe enable remote desktop (or co-pilot or some other solution) so that you can help him/her remotely when the need arises?

Answer 2

Set Firefox as default web browser just in case IE7 has a run of exploits like previous versions have suffered.

Open Office, just because.

Turn on windows update as well and make sure that windows doesn't keep popping up to say the users machine isn't protected by anti-virus when you know it is, that would be very off putting.

Answer 3

Sorry dude, but I'm one of your downmods. This question really has nothing to do with programming.

Answer 4

First of all, I'm curious what antivirus and spyware you installed. Just for my own purposes. Also, on this note, be sure that they don't just run, but update themselves. :)

To answer your question, I would install Firefox, a firewall (I recommend ZoneAlarm myself, but you might have other ideas), and an office suite (OpenOffice?).

Answer 5

Scheduled disk defrag at a regular period.

Answer 6

make sure they're set up not to be an administrative user.