Over the last weekend we were visiting family. They all had various Windows XP problems, from spam, to applications failing to load. I had a look, but I really have no enthusiasm for fixing Windows XP boxes, they are foreign, both metaphorically and practically (my French is awful).

I'm amazed that full grown adults tolerate such awful computers. Windows XP if left in the default looks like it was designed for a small child, it has terrible performance - a 2Ghz/1GiB box took many minutes to boot and the screen fonts were utterly awful. I suppose that explains why it took me days to make my work box almost as usable as my home Debian box.

What I found really funny was everyone was running bootleg versions of Windows XP and Office, so they have the automatic upgrades turned off to avoid the Microsoft Police. They don't want to run Linux which would be free and legal, but they didn't like being told that if they want to run Microsoft products they should pay for them!

Anyhow, I don't do support for illegal software, especially when it's foreign. I fixed a few obvious things and installed Mozilla and Thunderbird. I also told them if they were to run Linux the support would be free and even possible from the other side of the Channel.