20-07-2018, 08:29 AM
Al.
The spec of your laptop should run even a recent mint distro. 18.3 Sylvia using the Mate format would be OK but at 75gb you might be struggling for HDD space. Like Jeffrey and the others rightly say you do get a decent OS with good standard packages, eg, libre office, Firefox, Thunderbird mail, media and photo packages all as standard. You need the laptop to connect to the internet for the final installation of packages and updates. Linux will find and configure Bluetooth dongles and wireless USB dongles without driver discs, mint Tara 19 will even find a USB or network printer and configure it so long as its powered on. If its a combined printer scanner, "simple scan" will also work straight out of the box with no configuration needed.
You'll see a little green tick or a blue exclamation mark in the taskbar, this is the upgrade notification, make sure you set it up and do the upgrades its self explanatory, I do them when the tick changes to the explanation mark but I also do the kernal updates, this is reason why Linux is more secure, leave the upgrades and the PC gets more vulnerable although much less than on a windows distro especially XP which I'd not consider using on the internet.
The spec of your laptop should run even a recent mint distro. 18.3 Sylvia using the Mate format would be OK but at 75gb you might be struggling for HDD space. Like Jeffrey and the others rightly say you do get a decent OS with good standard packages, eg, libre office, Firefox, Thunderbird mail, media and photo packages all as standard. You need the laptop to connect to the internet for the final installation of packages and updates. Linux will find and configure Bluetooth dongles and wireless USB dongles without driver discs, mint Tara 19 will even find a USB or network printer and configure it so long as its powered on. If its a combined printer scanner, "simple scan" will also work straight out of the box with no configuration needed.
You'll see a little green tick or a blue exclamation mark in the taskbar, this is the upgrade notification, make sure you set it up and do the upgrades its self explanatory, I do them when the tick changes to the explanation mark but I also do the kernal updates, this is reason why Linux is more secure, leave the upgrades and the PC gets more vulnerable although much less than on a windows distro especially XP which I'd not consider using on the internet.
