[rescue] Retorical question: Anyone given "novices" Sun boxes to displace Win systems?

[Ken Hansen]

My father-in-law has an old Compaq P100 laptop that he
uses for email access, at 28.8K with a 14" monitor. I
have spent way too much time looking for a suitable
upgrade for him, and I am wondering if anyine has any
exp. dropping a Sun workstation on a newbies desk and
pointing out it runs Netscape/email just like a PC...

He is being forced to upgrade, since he got infected
with one of the many PC viruses, and he need 32 Meg to
run an anti-virus program (he only has 16 Meg). Before
I let him reach into his pocket and buy a proprietary
memory module for his laptop ($25-100), I was thinking
where shoul dhe really put his dollars?

My first thought was a $400-500 PCm which will include
a faster modem (56K), and orders of magnatude better
performance.

But what about a mid-line SPARCstation? Like an Ultra
1-170e with a nice creator framebuffer, 128+ Meg RAM,
and a 4 Gig HD (or 2x 2 Gig)? In theory, it will suit
his needs, and it will just run and run and run
without incident... Hell, Internet Explorer/Outlook
Express might even be reasonable.

A final, third option would be a low-cost all-in-one
Power Mac, like the 5400/180 MHz 603e system, but RAM
is expensive (based on a quick review of the market).

The Sun could be upgraded to 256 Meg for low $$
($10/32 Meg DIMM) and would be all but immune to most
viruses. Downside is that his connectivity is dial-up,
so I'd need to add a 56K external modem to the mix.
Also, cute executables from friends most likely
wouldn't work on his machine, but he *swears* he is
only really interested in email...

Thought/experiences?

Thanks,

Ken

=====
Ken
n2vip at yahoo.com

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