Windows 10 will Install Automatically over Win7 & 8

[Chuck Engels]

There was a Windows 95 and a Windows 98. Which were you referring to, Chuck?

Ooops, it's been so long Meant Windows 98, Windows 95 was terrible !!

[Steve Grisetti]

Windows 98 was still DOS-based. Chuck, you are a definitely a lover of the classics.

[George Tyndall]

Well, George, there's always this solution.
http://www.zdnet.com/article/why-switch ... 3-instead/

Thanks for that suggestion, Steve.

BTW, here is the $200 Win10 machine that my wife adores because it is so light in weight:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B015CQ ... =pc&sr=1-9

[Chris B]

Well, George, there's always this solution.
http://www.zdnet.com/article/why-switch ... 3-instead/

I never understood the fascination with Mint. It seems fine for techies but unless you've got an administrator who knows what they are doing it doesn't seem simple. Ubuntu seems a much better choice for the casual user. For example when the upgrade page from mint 17.2 to 17.3 contains the text:

Although Linux Mint 17.3 features a newer kernel, this upgrade does not change the kernel on your behalf. This is a decision only you should take. Should you decide to upgrade to 17.3’s recommended kernel you can do so by applying the “linux-kernel-generic” update, post-upgrade.

Quick straw poll - does anyone here have any idea how they would start to go about understanding if they needed to upgrade their operating system kernel - because it is "a decision only you should take"?

It goes on...

Linux Mint 17.3 uses Ubuntu Vivid’s Xorg/MESA stack and Virtualbox guest support compiled against it. This upgrade doesn’t not impact the Xorg/MESA stack you’re already using on your system and it does not upgrade your Virtualbox guest support (which is conveniently marked as a dangerous level 5 updates after you ugprade). Post-upgrade you’ll also see new versions of ubuntu-drivers-common and bcmw-kernel-source as level 3 updates in the Update Manager. They respectively improve support for NVIDIA prime and Broadcom chipsets. Please upgrade these these with caution.

(http://blog.linuxmint.com/?p=2955)

Now - I think that their philosophy is that you should know what you're doing when you do it - which is fine in principal - but hopelessly optimistic in practice. Windows (for better or worse) has spent a considerable amount of time hiding the complexities of operating systems from users. This has only been extended in the tablet and smart phone world. Asking general users to re-engage with this stuff is probably a lost cause.

Oh - and good luck editing video on it.... Last time I looked it wasn't pretty.

[Steve Grisetti]

As an experiment, I put Linux on an old netbook because I thought it might run better than Windows 7.

It did. But I haven't really used the netbook since.

[Chris B]

I moved a netbook from XP to Linux/XP Dual boot. Mint refused to install so I went with an Ubuntu variant. It required a reasonable amount of fiddling at the command line to make the mouse pointer work and a Bios upgrade to make the screen brightness play ball. Once it was up it worked and was usable, just a bit slow. It's not really a fair test as the hardware is underpowered to start with.