Windows 7 is going to be absolutely fine. If it's what she's used to, and you have the license and media, just go ahead.

And something like TeamViewer does the remote support nicely.

I'm all for Linux otherwise, but in this use case I'd let old people use whatever keeps them going.

Yeah, it's just an insecure mess.

She always makes a mess of Windows machines. If her first instinct weren't always to call my older brother for help, I'd have gotten her the Mac ages ago.

Well, perhaps it would be good to give her a non-admin account to Windows? The same approach you'd do with a Mac, but leaving her with a familiar UI.

Privilege escalation, even with UAC at its strictest, is trivial on Windows with the malware that's floating around these days.

I worked full time for 5 of the last 6 years on Windows malware research. Windows is a swiss-cheese joke of an operating system that won't progress because of a(n at this point pathological) need for 20 years of backwards compatibility. Microsoft: make use of that XP mode VM and extend that trend forwards, you fools.

Perhaps so, but at least it would keep some of the malware out.

Another option would be to put her regular use to a VM that you control (remotely) and can restore to a clean state at any time...

I'd like to see some kind of way to lock the system for older folks. I'm tired of troubleshooting my dad's computer. He doesn't even do so much as adding bookmarks, his machine exclusively browses the web.

I'd like to get everything he needs installed and lock out modifications. Needs cookies obviously, but not much else.

Somehow he manages to have video player issues in every single browser that I can't figure out. He has to watch youtube in chrome, live streams in firefox, etc. It's really dumb. Buying him a chromecast improved it some, though, by avoiding it.

Such limitations are of course possible. Perhaps you should look up what you can achieve by running secpol.msc.

(Myself, I find that model complex and unintuitive, being used to the Unix way, but everything has its learning curve.)

I bought my mom a Chromebook under similar circumstances. She absolutely loves it, and had zero difficulty switching, whereas she was previously even uncomfortable turning laptops on or off.

same situation here. I convinced my mother to just get an Android based tablet and ditch the laptop. This seems to be working better for her & me :)