My parents have had a 466M Celeron Win98 machine for the past four years and they are now wanting me to upgrade there computer/operating system. Since they use dial up and really can't justify the cost of broadband, I am weighing their upgrade options. Considering the bandwitdh needed to keep XP current with patches, virus signatures and firewall upgrades, not to mention the learnung curve, I do not think it is very feasable to use WinXP via dial-up. They only do email, via a POP/IMAP client and browse the web. I have until March to experiment with Knoppix, or something else, as a solution for there situation. Keep in mind this needs to be simple, IE.. easy to boot and select from a few on screen icons to read email or browse the WEB. Now for my thoughts for using Knoppix for them.

Boot from CD with the compressed image already installed on a FAT32 partition. This would boot and run faster but might require a remaster of the Knoppix to boot from the hard drive image. If the image on the hard drive gets corrupted they, with my help on the telephone, could reload the image from the Knoppix Boot CD to the hard drive.

Configure a dialer for their dial-up ISP, store this information to the hard drive and add an icon to the desktop for dial-up access.

I would need to configure a POP/IMAP client to retreive their email and store it on the hard drive for later reading and offline email replies.

I am sure most of this is in the Knoppix FAQ's but can anyone point me to a FAQ dealing with issues discussed above. Has anyone else implemented a simular solution?


Thanks Very Much In Advance For Any Advice
Ron