Happy Thanksgiving

Remember Last Year's Happy Thanksgiving? We talked about how hundreds of thousands, or maybe millions were going to return home, not only for a delicious Thanksgiving dinner, but also to perform hours of tech support on Mom and Dad's computers.

Well it's that time again, and here is a list of things to help you out:

Top 10 things to do for mom's PC over Thanksgiving from the Download Squad.

This leaves me wondering what I'm going to do on Dad's PC of course

But here is the list in short:

1. Backup her files
2. Organize her photos and install Picasa
3. Buy her a nice LCD screen
4. Get her some real speakers
5. Install Firefox
6. Install Evernote
7. Update (or Install) anti-virus and anti-spyware
8. Setup Skype
9. Run a system check use has Systweak
10. Get her a real email account and set up a vanity domain

OK, now I can agree with some of those things -- Items 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 7, 9 appear to be no brainers to me. It's all about fixing problems and keeping those customer support calls to a minimum throughout the rest of the year. But some of the other ones I worry would only cause more confusion and increase support calls.

Hmmm. There are some of these tools that I'm not even using myself. I'll have to check them out.

What recommendations do you have? What have you set up for your parents PC, either to make their lives easier, or more importantly, to make your OWN lives easier?