Note: This is a “best practices” for making a relatively low-cost investment work for someone without much computer skill. This was originally a forum post from January 2006.

I bought a used iBook 900 from Techrestore to configure and give to my dad to replace a heinous Windows/Dell 500 Mhz.

So what did I do? I put Tiger on the iBook, along with Firefox 1.5; removed all dock icons except the absolute necessary ones: Finder, Firefox (renamed “The Internet”), Dashboard, iCal, Home, Trash. I made an account for me and a non-admin account for him. I put only his regular 5 or 6 toolbar bookmarks in Firefox. In a stab at SteveG I left FF’s default toolbar BBC RSS news aggregator dropdown .

I set Firefox to open new windows as tabs to keep things organized.

In addition, I installed the wonderful FF extension AdBlock and imported a pre-made list of ads to block, like this one, which saves much bandwidth, a crucial thing for dialup users like my dad.

Dashboard widgets were installed and configured to his tastes (FOX sports ticker, calculator, weather, stocks). Software Update was set to Never Check for updates.

Then I set up Internet Connect to connect automatically after Firefox is launched and finds no connection, with dialing sounds turned on. Firefox is set to launch on login, so all he does is turn on the Mac and he should be looking at the Internet in a minute. I have him simply Shut Down after each session.

The dialup techno-screeching is awful but handy for diagnosis. In testing on site, the auto dialup worked about half the time. The other half’s failure was due to the connection taking longer than Firefox’s wait for a connection. In that case my dad’s instructed to click the “phone icon in the menu, at the top” and select Connect. He has no problem with this.

I delivered it to him with my old iMac 233’s keyboard (he’s not a pro typer, and finds laptop keyboards to be too small) and an optical Apple one button mouse, which in the strange flavor of a True Reality Inversion™, is considered by him to be an upgrade from an optical two-button mouse.

He’s not slow, just slow with computers. The Dell was his first ever, and I got that to him over the summer. It’s working so far for him, and on delivery of the iBook he seemed and stated he was much more comfortable.