Sunday, April 08, 2007

PCs for Seniors

In the spirit of my previous post on DVDs for Seniors, this blog post inspired me to write this post.

One problem I've had to overcome is that they kept moving the icons all over the desktop. I found a program called IconLock written in 1999 by PC Magazine. The article is still available. You can download it here.

While the article says "IconLock runs under Windows 95, Windows 98, and Windows NT 4," I've found that it runs fine under Windows XP. Do be sure that you exercise all the desktop and Start menu items that they'll need to use as you can't completely lock it down or they won't be able to launch items on the desktop or even from the Start menu.

One other tip. I setup a Blogger blog that I set as the homepage on their Internet Explorer. With that I can add links to their homepage from anywhere and all they have to do is close and reopen Internet Explorer and the new link will be right there in front of them!

As I mentioned earlier, I use LogMeIn for remote control. Works perfectly and the price is right!

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