
Reply To: Professional Services Assistance
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Windows 7 and 8 are such different animals.. 7, I hung on to as long as I could (hard drive crapped out) and 8 I gave a 2 hour try on a new machine before I nuked it and put 7 on the machine. Microsuck does not like it when you do that. They had stopped selling 7 but I had a 5 install OEM disc. Wait.. is that greek to you?
OEM is original equipment manufacturer, those CDs are usually reserved for “certified windows installers” but when windows 7 came out, I managed to get one.
If you want to hang on to windows for a while, a good system cleaning is where you want to start.
The cleaning programs I used for windows are spybot search and destroy, superantispyware, malwarebytes and I used a stand alone defrag program too.. trying to remember the name… drawing a blank. All can be downloaded from the majorgeeks site. Oh.. what they’re calling apps now, I call programs.
Linux comes in many flavors.. they’re called distros (distributions) I use Linux Mint, with cinnamon, but there’s Ubuntu Debian, Xface, red-hat and a slew more. Linux doesn’t care which one you run or how many on the same machine either. It can also be run directly from a USB stick… which is a great way to look at different distros without committing hard drive space to another OS.
I use mint/cinnamon because the desktop environment is similar to windows and can handle graphics rendering (depending on the computer’s guts)
Choosing a distro is generally based on what you do on the computer. Some are better for people that write code (not me) some are light weight bare bones interfaces – just the terminal window, which is what windows machines call the command prompt window and some are very close to what we see in windows systems.
For me, the most challenging thing was making my own bootable USB stick. it’s not a hard process but it is a pain in the tookas. First the easy part.. download the files. Then there’s what they call verifying the download.. confused the crap out of me. There’s generally a link to do that on whichever site the download comes from. I still don’t know what that does exactly.
The first time I installed linux, it was when a windows 10 machine just froze and I didn’t have a usb/stick/flash drive with linux yet and had go buy one. Little independent computer stores will sometimes make one cheap, especially if you bring your own stick. Sadly, I chose the wrong store, but water under the bridge. Since then, I have made 2 more bootable USBs. All 3 are linux mint, just different releases. It’s that prepper backups to backups thing.
One of my favorite things about Linux is that when there are updates available, they show them to you and let you decide if/when to update. Another is not needing an anti-virus program.
I wish I could re-read your post but this reply window is in front of it.. hmmm.
Do you know anything about the hardware in your machine? age, hard drive size..RAM..?
Not all software runs in Linux. What kept me from jumping off the windows ship for years was that two of the programs I use didn’t run in the Linux environment. Now with more software for linux, they do, sort of. There are alternatives to things like the windows office suite.. not too bad a learning curve.
There are intro to linux videos on youtube to get a feel for it without doing anything to your system.
was that too much of a pre-coffee-absorbtion post?