First off, there are plenty of “making a Linux PC ready for your grandmother” but I would like to focus on a system, that is pretty much set and forget with a failsafe (regular backups!!) and everything ready for your mom and dad (read: any normal computer user)
to access the internet. Now you say : Windows can do that!, and my response is, yes but can you sleep at night? Before we go any further , we need to check WHAT is it that the regular home desktop user needs?

1. A graphical user-friendly interface, and if possible a graphical booting sequence, not scary text scrolling by.
2. Multimedia capabilities, but NOT 32 different players, one of each (music, movie, etc.) that can play it all (or almost).
3. Office programs (as in a word processor, Excel-type program etc.) with which they can open their old files and their friends files.
4. A safe environment, where THEY don’t have to be on top of everything. The system should take care of itself with minimal intervention
5. Did I mention multimedia and simplistic?:)
6. Browser plugins. Mom and dad watch EVERYTHING, that means, YouTube, Windows Media files, PDFs, Documents, Excel, EVERYTHING that can be found online.
7. A way to regularly backup their data so that in the event of “someone” “accidentally” deleting some important file, it can be recovered by you walking them through over the phone.
8. Regular backups on DVD/CD of their data in case of a harddrive failure.

Granted, the last 2 are a bit tricky, especially the off-harddrive thing but it is doable. In fact all of this takes a standard productivity install of Fedora Core 6, a little time and bandwidth and 1 script!
On a side note, to make them switch easier, explain to them these things:

We start with the installation of Fedora Core 6. You can download it from HERE in all its multi CD form , or get the rescue CD and when you boot it, type linux askmethod. I tend to do this because I download then what I need, NOT all the CDs. Of course if you do not have a broadband connection at home then the CDs are your option.
When you boot and install Fedora from the rescue CD you have to give it a form of downloading and a mirror to download from. I tend to use HTTP, simply because I do not like ftp. And your closest mirror can be found from HERE. Enter the information at the required fields and watch it boot into the beautiful graphical installer.

From here on I generally choose the Use free space on selected Drive since I usually install this on a “clean” machine. However you can also remove all partitions or do a custom layout, however don’t overdo the complexity, this is a system that, in case of a breakdown, you need to be able to re-create as it was , VERY FAST

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