Windows 7 is an all-ages show

My great aunt is 92 and, as of Friday, she's a Windows 7 PC.

Now, Hilda is already not your typical nonagenarian. She is frequently online, does her finances in Quicken and recently abandoned AOL for Gmail (something I still haven't gotten my parents to do).

Unfortunately, while her mind is quick as ever, her Windows XP PC had slowed dramatically over the past few years, becoming nearly unusable. It's one of those things that many find so irksome about Windows PCs.

In any case, Hilda (I'm sparing her some spam by not including her last name) decided she needed a new computer and I offered to help. It was just a day after Windows 7 had made its debut and we headed to a local computer store. I found her a basic PC, monitor, and printer for $450 after rebate. She didn't really need the monitor, but it helped me a great deal as I transferred all of her files from her old PC to the new one.

If it were still the Windows Vista days, I might have been tempted to downgrade her new computer to Windows XP, so she wouldn't have to adjust to the new operating system.

But, with Windows 7 working so well, I actually felt comfortable she could make the switch, even though she's at the other end of the age spectrum from Kylie.

It took me almost no time to set up the new computer, but several hours to transfer over her settings and documents and then re-install Quicken and her other programs.

Amazing techie that she is, it took her almost no time to adjust to Windows 7's new look and feel. It's a few days in and I'm glad to report that things have continued to be smooth.

"It really is not very different from the XP I used before," she told me in an e-mail this week.