Porteus

Hello Folks! Sorry to bother you but I've a small question about Porteus. I'm looking for something to replace the out of date MS Vista on my wife's notebook for her. The notebook is a Dell Inspiron 1545 with a upgraded Intel P8700 processor and 4 GB DDR2-800 RAM in it. Our grandson did the upgrades to the notebook about 4 years ago and the notebook worked really well until a year or so ago. My wife loves the notebook and has kept exceptional care of it, and except for some shiney keys where she has typed it seriously looks almost new. A young fella at our local computer repair shop mentioned installing linux on it and rattled off a few names so I figured I'd ask the people that use this type of linux about it.
Would Porteus be a good choice for a couple of older folk to use (I'm near 73 and my wife is 74)? Is it difficult to install and get to work? At our age I don't have a lot of time nor patience to tinker for hours to get things to work for us. All my wife was using the notebook for was writing letters and e-mails to our family (4 children, 14 grandchildren and 8 great grandchildren (one more in the pot and due in 4 months to make it 9), looking at pictures they send us and the Face Book stuff with old neighbors and friends.

Thanks for taking time to answer,
Gramps a.k.a. Grandpa, Gampa and Boompa.

Hello Gramps, welcome to Porteus.

I think Porteus will work for you and you may have to take a couple of baby steps for it to fit your needs. I would suggest you install Porteus to a USB drive and test it out that way. That way if you don't like it you haven't hurt your Windows system.

See this posting on how to install it to a USB drive. cannot create a bootable porteus USB stick (Post by brokenman #67034) Once installed verify that it displays on your screen, can see your hard drive and can access the 'net. Once that's working we will expand from there.

The version I recommend is Porteus 4.0 Cinnamon. It is similar to the senario you currently use.

Gramps wrote: ↑

01 Nov 2018, 22:25

Would Porteus be a good choice for a couple of older folk to use (I'm near 73 and my wife is 74)? Is it difficult to install and get to work? At our age I don't have a lot of time nor patience to tinker for hours to get things to work for us.

Hi Gramps, I would suggest, upgrade laptop's hard disk drive to SSD type if you intended to continue using Windows, be it Vista, 7, 8.1 or 10.