Mint 18 instead of Win 7?

[#1]

I am presently running Win 7 because it was in a new lenovo E535 laptop which had to be bought to replace a defunct HP one. I played with Ubuntu 8.04 and 10.04.1 on their own on a Pentium laptop many years ago with some success but this laptop tuned its toes up eventually. I then crawled back to Win XP Pro to keep going until that machine lost its BIOS!!

I expect to get Win7 to be "updated" to a non-operating condition any time at all to get us to go to Win 10 which is a path I do not want to take. I could try a dual boot with Mint 18 with  unused space in the Win 7 partition but really fear to [-Censored-] it up. I might try a VM with the Mint in it. Again  it seems a bit of too many eggs in the basket to me and I cannot cope with losing everything except the back-up in HDs most of my valuable stuff.

I have been toying with getting a new desktop machine with no OS or one with any M$ offering that I can boot out. I would then put Mint 18 in and get back to a Linux OS and then try to put in the require software to do my normal activities with the laptop as a true back-up. I am using Libre Office (M$ version) as it is, so that will not be a problem.

Any words of wisdom or other propositions of a basic plan of action will be welcomed.

[#2]

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@colintivy wrote:

I expect to get Win7 to be "updated" to a non-operating condition any time at all to get us to go to Win 10 which is a path I do not want to take.

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Since Windows 10 is no longer a free upgrade from Windows 7 or 8.1 then Microsoft should stop their hard sell.

Microsoft takes a cut from any computer sold with Windows pre-installed so if you can find one with no OS it ought to be cheaper.  But then the demand for these is small so you might miss-out on bulk discounts.

[#3]

Buy a replacement HDD, install Mint 18 on it, put the old one in a caddy.

That way you have all the documents and it will not upgrade to win10

OR back up all the docs to a dvd. Blow it away and install Mint 18. Restore your docs.

[#4]

If you follow that suggestion I strongly recommend you get a Solid State Drive (SSD) because they are so fast.

[#5]

Mint on a normal hdd isn't a slacker either, it can have a full boot to desktop in <30sec on a hdd. SSD makes it about 20sec.
Depends on what capacity you want; I have a 120Gb ssd on this pc, mainly 'cause it was cheap when I bought it. But larger capacity ones are very expensive.

M$ on the other hand does benefit from a SSD.

[#6]

@ReedRichards.

Thanks for that. I looked for a OS-less desktop a long time ago, very rare it seems. I would expect to find an unsold Win 7 machine in the present circumstances for a reasonable sum though. It should be simple to empty the first partition with 7 in it and all the others with Win-based programmes and start again by installing Mint 18 (64). Is it likely that all the files should be on the system to be ext 4? The BIOS ought to be able fire things up.

@HairyMcbiker.

Thanks to you too. I have a spare HD in a caddy but do not think that I can access the HD in the laptop very easily. i think that leaving the laptop as it is all M$ and do my modifications on the other machine once I have got it. Can you think of any special pitfalls in doing so?

[#7]

Usually the hdd is easily accessed.
One of mine was under a drawer, held by 2 screws. the other you removed one screw and the side cover lifted out and the hdd slid out from there.
Google your model and hdd removal.

As to a cheap pc, Aria were selling a core 2 with win7 on it for <£100 yesterday.

[#8]

Manufacturers know that hard drives fail quite frequently, so most laptops are designed to allow very easy access to the hard drive.  If a laptop did not have that facility I would not buy it.

On my computer Windows 7 and Windows 10 both share a 240GB SSD.  A month or two ago you could buy one of those of a decent brand for under £50 but they have gone up at least £10 in price since.  I have not timed the start-up but it doesn't feel like anything as long as 20 seconds for either version of Windows.

Completely obliterating Windows 7 seems to be burning your bridges behind you unnecessarily.  At the very least, leave behind the Recovery partition so you could restore the machine to its factory state if you subsequently want to pass the machine on to somebody else.

[#9]

I am talking from BIOS to actually being able to use it, not just a desktop. I have seen a boot -> desktop on M$ that was unusable for another 5 min while it "shuffled stuff" about.

I can boot this pc (Mint 18), and scan then print something faster than my old W7 used to boot. And that was on a normal HDD not SSD.

[#10]

I've just finished building 4 PCs using 32GB M.2 disks mounted on the Motherboard and from cold they're up and waiting for a login in just under 6 seconds. The OS in this instance CLI 2012 R2 x64.

[#11]

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@HairyMcbiker wrote:

I can boot this pc (Mint 18), .....

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That's an old version, why not install the latest

Phil

The dreaded "8 )" without a space strikes again!!!!!