They live in Great Britain, and I live in Poland. The Internet gives us a way of staying in contact without paying big bucks for international telephone connections. When I first moved here they already had a PC running Windows and I installed a modem and setup an Internet account for them. In the main that proved itself worthwhile, but occasionally something would go wrong with Windows, or the Internet provider would change the system being used, and we would have a problem.
Had I been able to visit them, I could have fixed things quickly, but I'm a time zone away, so that option was not realistic. I could ask them to do something and tell me what happened and lead them through the process with them being my eyes and hands, which quickly runs up a huge telephone bill. Obviously doing something together and being there for each other has its points, but you come to a point where you could have used that time on the phone, spread over a few months, as your contact instead of the Internet. The other possibility was for my parents to pay for assistance from a company near their home, possibly from the Internet provider. The cost of such assistance is daunting from the point of view of pensioners and amazing seen through the eyes of someone like me who is working at Polish rates of pay.
Added to the costs is the fact that the people doing on site support clearly don't know very much, they always want to install the most popular software, although I always made a point of installing the most reliable program available and a ny problem they didn't know how to solve was an excuse to propose an upgrade. This kind of experience left me feeling half crazy, and the increasing problems I could see Windows users having with viruses transmitted via email told me that it was only going to get worse. I had thought several times about setting up a mini-Linux system for them to use in an emergency. Linux will fit on a single flop py disk and provide basic command line functions. I had decided against that as I felt my parents needed a Windows like Graphical User Interface (GUI), but when they decided on a new PC I put pressure on them let me put Linux on part of the
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