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Something very similar happened to me + my old father (not tech savy). My parents have carefully written down steps on how to accomplish various functions (seems very unnatural to me but that is the only way they get things done on PCs).

I went to his place yesterday and as part of the usual tech support, he said he couldn't open his email and was confused why. Turns out, his machine had upgraded to Windows 10. What was horrible was that Windows decided to be in tablet-only mode (completely unfamiliar to me since I left Windows after Win7.. the Metro UI sucks when forced on non-tablet users). His printer/scanner all went kaput. It really made the entire day crummy. I say shame on you Microsoft. I've got my father an iPad but it isn't a PC replacement. He refuses MacOs because of the stupid touchpad. It is sad.




ChromeOS. Easiest OS to use. It's just a browser. Does he have a real need for native applications? Can he get everything he needs accomplished inside a browser (Google Docs, email, etc)? How much of what he's doing now is in the browser anyways?

I switched my grandfather over to it this year and he loves it. No more notifications / nags for updates, adware, and such. All extraneous pain points from windows are stripped away.

Just works.


>He refuses MacOs because of the stupid touchpad.

Huh? You can hook a mouse up to any Mac. Also, in what way are Mac touchpads different from Windows touchpads?


Scrolling direction?

Though I'm sure you can change that in the parameters somewhere.


Of course you can. You can also, I think, reverse trackpad scrolling on Windows.

However, I dislike the fact that on MacOs they call the setting "natural scrolling" and that they enable it by default for any trackpad you hook up.

Moreover, since the "Magic Mouse" is basically a mouse with a trackpad for a scrolling wheeel, they also enable reverse scrolling by default for any mouse.


It's unnatural for anyone that grew up with mice and trackpads.

It's 100% natural for phones. Most people don't realize "natural scrolling" on OSX is phone scrolling.

Makes sense when you realize they ripped the magic trackpad code out of iOS's touch screen event handler.


Yes, you can reverse it on Windows. I should know, Windows 10 activated 'natural' scrolling on my touchpad when I upgraded. I'm really not sure why.




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