If you need to sell her on it, brush up on C.K.'s glowing endorsement. Make her Safari experience better by installing Saft.
Sure, you could roll your eyes when the subject of virii comes up, but I find it's better to install peace of mind than give a piece of mind. ClamXav is free and quite excellent in this regard. That is, if the version of TechTool you're using isn't the most up-to-date, you could actually fry the machine. In fact, if the Mac purchased at any point had AppleCare, but the OS had been upgraded to Tiger, you should NOT use the "free" version of TechTool that comes with AppleCare. OK, if you really want to defrag, or just run some pretty extensive diagnostics, there's always the excellent app TechTool from Micromat.It's not optimal for large defrags, or huge files, but unless Mom's working on cutting a major motion picture, I doubt that's an issue. Since Panther, OS X has included a sort of on-the-fly defrag utility that runs silently in the background when needed. Set it up using the Pilot portion of the app to quietly optimize the Mac on a regular basis. But I don't think Mom cares for all that CLI business. Sure, it's a GUI front-end for the *NIX commands you could do in Terminal. About everyone I know uses Cocktail on a regular basis to do stuff that makes your Mac happy.And Apple has some great tips and techniques for backup as well, though they require some heavy lifting in some cases. Just make sure you have another drive handy (a big old external FireWire drive is best). There's also Carbon Copy Cloner, which allows you to make a total copy of her hard drive. I set up my wife's iBook to back up her Keychain and settings nightly, Mail messages and critical docs weekly, and all Home files monthly. Mac account, I'd say use Backup.app judiciously. Backup time! There are a lot of ways to do this.Also, the likelihood of having to fix it next year will be pretty slim (as opposed to that 1999 vintage Dell she's been using). It also looks might cool and comes with almost everything she'll need inside. My suggestion is an iMac because it's just the right blend of computer, entertainment center, and communications device. First, if she doesn't have one, buy her a Mac.So while everyone is sitting on the couch staring at the TV, you can squirrel yourself away in the computer nook getting the family Mac in tip-top shape (and be quite the hero). Since you'll no doubt be freeloading on Mom's yummy Thanksgiving meal tomorrow, it's only right that you should fix her computer, right? Download Squad has posted up full instructions for the PC folks, and I thought I'd chime in with the Mac side of the force.
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