A Thanksgiving Tech-Support Toolkit
Put installers for a few essential maintenance and Internet programs on that flash drive. For Windows, I suggest the free AVG anti-virus utility, the Spybot Search & Destroy and Windows Defender spyware removers, the AutoRuns startup optimizer, the Opera and Mozilla Firefox browsers (use Opera, not Firefox, on a older, slower machine) and the Mozilla Thunderbird e-mail client. For Mac OS X, the list is shorter: Firefox and the free ClamXav anti-virus tool (especially if anybody who uses the Mac keeps forwarding Windows viruses by mistake).