I dropped my mom off at the airport this morning at 5 am — a difficult hour for a grad student.  Hopefully, she and her shiny red laptop are now sitting on a plane headed to Detroit (or, as she insists on calling it, DEE-troit).

Getting her new computer set up was surprisingly simple.  Apparently some of the bugs have been worked out of Vista since I bought my PC 1.5 years ago.  Best Buy actually wanted to charge her more than $250 to remove Spyware and install Norton security (which is itself spyware!).  Using PCDecrapifier and AVG free antivirus, we were able to take care of that for free in less than an hour.

I also introduced her to the wonders of Thunderbird, Firefox and OpenOffice.org.  Since her job often involves having to edit Powerpoint and Word documents, she had to fork over money for Office 2007.  But since that software has a lame new user interface and is lousy at exporting to pdf, she is going to try using OpenOffice when possible.  Hooray for Open Source Software!

She can check her person email with Thunderbird, and seems to like that, but I was really annoyed to discover that all of the the thousands of people who work for her employer are apparently required to use Microsoft Outlook to check their work email — they don’t seem to have IMAP or POP installed on their Exchange servers.  I really couldn’t believe that.  I guess I’d forgotten how pervasive Microsoft products are outside of particle physics.  It may be convenient that most of the world uses common software, but does it really have to be such crappy, infuriating software?