Salvage

[billroper]

I have an old Toshiba laptop running Windows Vista that has become increasingly crochety about it. I've decided to try loading one variant or another of Linux on it and see if it becomes more useful.

Having seen a similar old Toshiba laptop doing so earlier this evening at the girls' school encourages me. :)

Comments

[rinioth.livejournal.com]

If there is enough space on the hard drive it's possible with most Linux distributions to have a dual boot system, even on only one drive.

The runes go something like:

Clean up the windows file system and compress it
Use an intelligent partitioning tool to make the windows partition smaller
Run the Linux installer and tell it to use the unpartitioned free space
When the installer asks about writing the boot record tell it to overwrite the mbr so that the Linux boot menu has control

You will then get a boot menu that includes, Linux and Windows

Which Linux

[sam'l bassett (from livejournal.com)]

I recommend Linux Mint

[hms42]

I am pulling some 512mb DDR ram from some older machines, that you can have, if the machine is running on less and uses that type. (I think Vista required 1gb ram.)