Setting up T60 to enable elderly to use.

[JimmyD]

Hi, I'm in the beginning phase or setting up a T60 2007-56, 15" lcd. for my brother who is 80yr's. old . He has poor sight and poor hearing. Also he has no experience with computer's. He also is in poor health. He has a lot of time on his hand's , so I'm in hope's of giving him somthing interesting to do.
I'm posting this note to see if some of you have done somthing similiar. I'd be really interested in your comment's and suggestion's.
This project will be kinda on a budget and use what I have on hand.
So far, the T60 , 80gb. hdd. DVDCDRW , 1.5gb. Ram, 1.8x ghz. CPU. Win 7 Pro.
So hope to make a difference in his life.
JimD

[Tasurinchi]

I did a similar setup for my father. He's 84 but still in good health considering the age. His eyesight is not that bad but he's a little bit deaf (although he denies that of course and blames us for not speaking clearly). I've setup an R50 with a 15" screen using Win7 Ultimate. I chose the native resolution of 1400x1050 but with bigger icons and letters, I've also put the speaker volume quite high and teach him how to zoom in Internet Explorer as some pages have tiny font sizes.

I think your's a great idea for your brother. What I did at the beginning for my father is to google for sites related to the hobbys he has (gardening, geology in his case) and save them as favorites. At the beginning I activated IE's favorites tab on the left side to make it easier for him. He started using computers in his late 70s and learnt basic browsing. Now he is quite independent browsing and writing emails, he has a long list of favorites and his own folder where he stores his documents and photos I send him from time to time. Now he rarely ask me or my brothers something.

The setup you have is more than enough to start using a computer so I wouldn't worry much hardware-wise. I would not set up a resolution under the T60's native one, if your brother has poor eyesight I would make the icons and the fonts bigger (Win7 is good at that.) but keep the native resolution, otherwise the images can look pixeled or not sharp enough.

Hope this helps... I wish you good luck with your brother!

Cheers!

[JimmyD]

Thank's for your input, I'm working on the "Favorites" now. JimD

[Tasurinchi]

Another thing I would consider is installing a dock program (like Rocketdock, freeware) and put the programs your brother use there. The dock will allow you to define the size of the icons and you can link there folders and favorites directly. Then clean all icons from the desktop.

I find many people that had no previous computer experience get confused or scared when they suddenly see a desktop full of icons (for which most of them they won't use anyway).

Cheers!

[JimmyD]

Thank you, I'll check on the software. JimD.