NM...whatever the newest cat is...snow leopard..that's it.

My uncle had it and installed it.

Smooth function, but got REALLY slow after a month.

aha yes as others have said. that's like driving your car 24 hours a day to prevent tire flatspots.

people and their weird ideas about what makes a computer work better...

well if she defrags and does a manual disk scan on a regular basis maybe you should try a Antivirus you actualy pay for like the offerings from trend micro etc. I have found that they can be alot more thorough and find things other AV programs can miss esp the free ones just dont get norton they suck balls.

It's been my experience that most older people are absolutely terrified of computer "viruses". If they ever see anything that says, "you may have virus", "you're computer may be infected", "download our virus software" they will click on it and download anything they're prompted to download.

A reformat will fix it, it's not really worth the time to even try to figure out and remove all the crap that's in there, IMO.

I DON'T pay for software <G>. Too much free stuff out there. I still haven't gotten her computer to do the work on it but I think I will have it in a day or two (too bad because I have to stay up all night - swapping to night shift this week).

i have 3 macs right now:
mac pro single 2.8ghz quad core xeon w/ 10gb ram
macbook pro (early 2008 version) 2.6ghz w/ 4gb ram and 200gb 7200rpm drive
macbook (new version) with whatever it comes with

never had any problems with any of them except for a failing hard drive on macbook pro which was mostly my fault. replaced on last day of warranty though :)

try clean install. you did an upgrade from big kernel to small kernel and they are very different even though it looks the same.

Nah- get her a Playstation. No worries about viruses, updates, malware, yadda yadda yadda. It's a little hard to type on the tiny keyboard, but it's the best computer you can buy, and will lower your coolant temps and shift your whole compressor map to the right.