[elija]

Well, he's back up and running!

I plugged in the Ubuntu disk in and he was amazed when all his hardware worked When he looked at it he actually thought it was OK. Yay me!

He is staying with Windows; fair play to him he is staying with Windows as games are very important to him. However he has promised to stop calling Linux hard and Windows easy. Oh and he is now using Firefox / Thunderbird / Open Office. So it's a start

[Manchunian]

You didn't manage to get him to dual boot then? Perhaps next time he has a virus and needs to do a re-install you can push him that far!

[elija]

One step at a time. In fact several small steps this time..

I got him to admit that Linux is actually quite impressive
I have got him to use some FOSS alternatives under Windows

He does use his PC mostly for games, a bit of surfing and email and the odd bit of WP so he isn't going to consider swaping yet... maybe when Linux has the games available.

[L4Linux]

You got him to use openoffice?I have managed to convert 10 out of 12 colleagues to use firefox and 0 to use openoffice...
(But i am confident they will use oo3, when they see they can edit PDFs)
Show him the free games under Ubuntu. Nexuiz,Alien/open arena, astromenace, etc. Maybe he will dual boot then.

[Redman]

Although I do not use Windows at home anymore (see my sig), I have been struggling yesterday everning with an old laptop of my father.

He wanted a bigger harddisk which I installed for him. I even installed Windows 2K on it (the best it can use). He tried to install the graphical drivers and stuff and it did not work.

Although my father isn't a "root", he is smart enough to install things properly. But somewhere along the line, things went bad. So I was asked to solve it.

After struggling with Windows again, I started to appriciate Linux even more.
How quickly had I forgotten the troubles you could face with it.

Bottom-line: I too feel sad for your cousin.
Hopefully he will see the light