I am sure she could grasp using gmail it is fairly easy and all she has to do is use her browser and she does that to view any website just save gmail as a fave so she can find it easily. I personally would set her up with firefox instead of IE for ease of use and safety and then you could simply put the gmail link directly on the bookmarks toolbar so it is right there for her to click on and set gmail up to remember her info. If she has Vista the firewall in it should be ok for her just make sure once you remove za you turn on the windows firewall in security center. for antivirus I am not sure what you are using but I also like AVAST free you do have to do a real easy quick registration that they send to your email but then it is set , you have to do the register thing about once a year. I would make sure you put some good anti malware programs on there and show her how to open them update them and run a full scan with them have her set up a schedule once a week to run her scans when her pc is on, these 2 are the best SUPERAntiSpyware Free Edition Malwarebytes' Anti-Malware she will have to remember to hit the update button before scanning. Also good to have is spywareblaster, this one is not a scanner for it just open it once a week hit update, hit enable all protection, the shield turns green that is it. SpywareBlaster and I agree congrats to her for being willing to take on the technology world! Definitely set up windows auto updates to do them automatically for her she definitely wants to get those and make her understand she does have to leave the computer on so that her programs get their updates. That is one big issue I run into with some elderly, they think they only want to turn it on when they need it then the pc gets way behind on updates and when it is turned on everything tries to update at once and it can be a big mess. leaving it on does not hurt anything mine stay on 24/7. for that reason it is really safer to leave it on rather than keep it off! She could schedule her scans to happen at night while she is asleep.

Asolo, the stats I referenced in my previous post were from a company called Net Applications. They pull their data from computer as their users visit popular Web sites and their data has nothing to do with sales. So I think those non-business users you mention would be reflected in the statistics. Maybe those Apple home users don't surf the Web and the Windows business users do. I'd like to see some facts to support your claims. You may be correct, but I can't find any data reflecting a 20% Apple share of the home computer market. Tonbiak, if Mac OSX is better then Windows why did Apple spend major capital to re-engineer their computers to accept an inferior OS? I never understood their reasoning. If the majority of Apple owners are using Windows, then doesn't Apple become another "compatible" vendor like Dell, HP, and the rest? Please enlighten me. If I were selecting a home computer and didn't know a lot about them, I would prefer to have one that is similar to the computer nine out of ten of my neighbors, friends, co-workers and relatives own. I have nothing against Apple. If you are happy with your Apple computer then I'm happy for you. Here is a link that might be useful: Market Share by OS

If she wants a desktop program, it will depend on the operating system she has. If XP, then she can use Outlook Express and configure her Yahoo, Gmail, or whatever to download into that without going to the web site. If she has Windows 7, MS has a program called Windows Live Mail which she must install on her computer. Again, her mail can be configured to download to her desktop program. And there's Thunderbird which has been mentioned.

How wonderful. Animals are so important to so many people.