Why am I doing this...?

A month ago, my father in law told us he wanted to get on the internet (He'd had dial up e-mail until now), but, his computer was a little bit 'past its best'. So started a journey to find a way to provide at limited cost a PC based environment that:

a) ...he would be familiar with (That meant Windows XP Home, just for my sanity)

b) ...would do everything he needed to do (Word Processing, Spreadsheets, E-Mail).

c) ...could be supported by my wife and I from a distance.

The biggest issue was the 'office' software (he'd been using a combination of very old versions of Microsoft and Lotus software). At the time, when all this started, we were also using MS Office, but, it was time for an update...coincidentally, OpenOfficeOrg had just released Version 2.0 of OpenOffice and had therefore sparked my interest in the 'Free as in Beer' possibilities of Open Source software.

Over the coming weeks and months, you will be able to read about our experiences and the realities of actually using and supporting a PC built up from Open Source or Freeware software.

I'm not an OpenSource evangelist, neither have I had the time to learn Linux (maybe one day), I just want a PC that works, that my father in law and my wife can use, and, most importantly, doesn't take hours to support.