I have recently added Twitter to my social media mix (you can Follow me at MarkAPatten or our firm account at DelphicSage) of primarily Facebook (mostly personal stuff) and LinkedIn. There are endless other social networks that you can add to the mix. So, how do semi-obsessive compulsive people like myself not pull out our hair trying to keep all of them reasonably up to date - perhaps even multiple times per day?

A few weeks ago, my Mom told me she needed a computer. I had an old, extra laptop hanging around so I told her and my Dad not to buy one. The first application I installed was Google's Chrome web browser.  Read on to find out why.

Before I installed Chrome, I installed a fresh copy of Windows XP (That I also happened to have lying around.)

To address some concerns coming from the dark corner of the internets full of *nix people: no, I wasn't going to install Ubuntu or another Linux on her machine. I lost sleep over the decision not to install FreeBSD, however. These operating systems are just not ready for Mom.  It's just this old 1.5 GHz HP zt3000 with 1GB RAM and built in wireless. A very decent machine. I had run Gentoo on it for years, and wrote many Java libraries for various things. With old sentiments like that, I could only give it to my Mom. And, no I didn't have an extra Mac on hand (although I wish I did!).

Anyway, continue reading to find out why I feel that google chrome is the best way for my mom to surf the web.