I permanently hooked up an old laptop to a 25" monitor and an under-table keyboard tray. My mother was very happy. Just the right size.
Forget chromebooks, just get all the oldies iPads.
Looks like you’ll want to keep it installed until after the renewal/account has been cancelled
https://support.norton.com/sp/en/us/home/current/solutions/kb20090818144126EN
Over the last decade or so I’ve researched this a few times (often starting here) and every time it returns to Defender being the only thing anyone really needs. Obviously, there are some folk, especially of the ‘tech-head’ variety, that might want/need more, but most grandma/grandpas aren’t in this subset.
Norton is a massive memory hog, Defender works just fine, and I seem to recall rumors that Avast was somehow tied to the Russians?
Avast (who also own AVG) is a Czech company. Kaspersky is Russian.
Just realized that even though many here may not actually be grandma/grandpas we probably are in that age range. And I consider 50 to not even be in the ‘just barely’ or ‘only in the deep hills of Alabama’ range. Welcome to the weekend all you old bastards!
Kaspersky is not only Russian, but Kaspersky himself was literally Russian intelligence. I would recommend that no one ever put that stuff on their machine.
I’m currently using Avira. I tend to change quite often depending on what the current best free anti-virus seems to be at the time. I researched this quite a bit a couple months ago and it seems pretty mixed on people feeling defender is enough and others feeling you really need something else.
I think that’s part of why I stick with defender.
There’s really no conclusive evidence that other antivirus systems are better… So that means they aren’t worth the hassle.
I mean, the last time I thought my wife had managed to get her laptop infected it was just McAfee itself hijacking the browser.
Postscript to my tale (after successfully cancelling her unneeded Norton, noted upthread): today I drove two hours to my mother’s to install the new PC because she had said the older one (running Win 7) was dead. And of course, as I suspected, it wasn’t dead, it had somehow locked up during shutdown and she just left it there, frozen. When we had discussed this earlier by phone, for reasons I will never understand, it never occurred to me to suggest that she try rebooting it.
That’s right, the most basic fucking solution escaped me. So today, in her apartment, I unplugged the old PC, plugged it back in, turned it on, and the old rig runs like a charm. She called me a genius. Not quite.
Nonetheless, I went ahead and installed the new PC, running Win 10, and she’s a) happy with computer, b) happy I made it a gift to her and c) happy I visited. So on the whole, it worked out, and Norton is no longer getting her money.
Note: the new PC, an HP, had McAfee installed and running by default. I uninstalled it and made sure Win Defender was running. During the McAfee uninstall, you get a big warning!! Are you sure you want to uninstall? it says, noting that it is “free.” That’s BS, of course, it’s free for just 30 days, after which you can get a discounted rate for the first year and thereafter pay $120 a year. All of which I’m sure my mother would have done on her own had I not nipped that in the bud.
My parents do listen to me when it comes to their PC. Unfortunately, I live in another country, so things can get out of hand while I’m away. Every year when I come to visit, they prepare a list of issues to sort. I usually find an AV or two installed, as well as a number of things being moved around, all courtesy of well wishers, do gooders, and the occasional PC tech person who got their hand on my parents PC.
I with there was some sort of app that notified me as soon as an AV is installed on their PC, so I can remove it immediately.
Learn to install AnyDesk on their machines so you can remote in
Yeah we do that, but it’s not the same as being in the same room and basking in the glory of being the computer genius son.
I thought of this but $10 a month for what might be 2-3 uses a year just isn’t worth it. Wish there was an open source sort of low end thing like this…
Not that anyone wants even MORE of it in their lives, but Zoom allows you to give remote control access to your PC. Although, I’ve had people with degrees unable to follow my directions (“click the yellow button that says ‘share’, then click the…”) to do so…
We get requests from people working remotely on their own hardware, which obviously means none of our support tools are present. Zoom remote control at least lets us pretend to be helpful :-)
To be clear, it gives you remote access to their entire PC, or just remote access to their Zoom installation?
The entire PC. You can control M+K like you were sitting at their machine. I haven’t had to do it in a while, but I think the wrinkle was that elevation prompts aren’t visible to the remote user (secure desktop and all that) so you’d have to ask your parent to click “yes” on those.