A unique situation

I recently got a new mbp and so my dell inspiron 6400 got relegated to the position of a paper stand. My dad decided to use my old dell for his office purposes. Which just comprises of checking the mail.

Now the problem, here is that my dad has never ever used a computer before in his life. So i reformated my dell. Installed firefox, avg and vlc. Disabled all the startup programs. Disabled UAC. Disabled windows search and indexing.
Created a desktop shortcut of firefox. Renamed it to "Mail". Set the homepage as gmail.com and saved my dad's id and password in firefox for auto login.

Oh btw im using windows vista home premium.

Is there anything i missed out? anything which would help him?

 

You could use something like spybot to automatically run searches for spyware, plus making sure windows updates are turned on and set to auto download and install.

Also, with AVG, are you running both the antivirus & the firewall? If not, you might want to install a free firewall too.

 

Yepp, switch UAC back on - it doesn't pop up in normal use - or it shouldn't.
It adds to Vista's defense

Speaking of E-mail - you may want to try Windows Live Mail or Thunderbird to read and send e-mails, I highly prefer it to web clients.

Keep Windows Search and Indexing running, indexing runs through once and then no longer slows your computer down.

And "all the startup programmes" - I'm pretty sure you disabled some stuff you'd better kept on... while there are things where it is highly debatable wether its useful to keep them (Office, Adobe Quickstart as two examples), there are also programmes that are useful and/or needed.

Because it works now, it doesn't mean it'll always work.

 

Create a restore disk once you have it set up, that way if anything ever goes wrong it can be easily restored by your Dad without much more than a couple of instructions over the phone from you.