I have an old Dell laptop,running XP, on my bench that I use for viewing schematics, terminal emulation etc. The other day the USB ports stopped working. It turns out that some old Sony mobile phone software has completely screwed all the settings and hidden itself in such a way that is proving difficult to completely remove. Thank you Sony
Now would be a good time to ditch Windows and go over to Linux. I'm looking for suggestions for something relatively easy to use with a graphic GUI that can support a PDF file reader, terminal emulator, Irfanview (or similar) etc.
The spec of the laptop is
Dell Inspiron 2200
1.4GHz Celeron processor.
1.2GByte Ram
75GB hard disc
DVD-RW drive
Al
I've been thinking about moving to Linux for a while. There's a lot of stuff out there about which version to choose. Here's a sensible looking site:
https://www.techradar.com/news/best-linux-distro
My choice would probably be Mint, a derivative of Ubuntu. For my own system I'd need to check that it can run some specialist software (Xilinx FPGA stuff) as that's only specified for a few Linux versions. Otherwise you'll be using Libreoffice for word processing, spreadsheets etc, Firefox for web browsing and plenty of choice for picture and PDF viewing.
For a low spec system like yours you certainly want a lightweight version. I think that Mint is fairly light on resources. But you don't need one of the ultra light versions such as Puppy.
I hope Trevor comes along soon and helps you from a position of lots of practical experience.
Don't forget you can run a lot of Windows software using WINE which is bundled witn many Linux versions. Or you can using a virtual machine such as Virtualbox to instal Windows as a guest OS.
I use Ubinto with a KDE desktop.
It looks and feels a bit like windows except for a lot of the icons being only a single click.
I have just posted a live CD to a mate who had never seen Linux before to sort out a formatted laptop he was given.
The thing was on line in a couple of days.
The live DVD was PClinuxOS.
I'm probably well out of date regarding Linux but does it support USB plug & play?
Peter
From the link that Jeffrey posted Lubuntu and Puppy seem fine. The system requirements for Mint are very vague about the min processor speed but as far as ram goes 18.3 is OK and 19 is OK just. Trevor had a thread running recently about mint, hopefully he can shed some further light on the subject.
Al
The answer is to try it and see. A Linux install is easier than WIndows (I've done Ubuntu a couple of times as an experiment) as there's no faffing around with activation. You're up and running in less than half an hour. If you can do word processing and browse the web at reasonable speed then you're winning. I suspect that your old PC will struggle with high res video and other intensive tasks, whatever the OS.
It is possible to make a rescue USB stick like a rescue disk.
USB is obviously OK.
I haven't tried it but I'm told that you can load Linux onto a USB stick and run it from there without disturbing the Windows configuration.
It allows you see see what Linux is like and compared different distros, then install the one you prefer/runs best on your machine.
I've cerrtainly run Ubuntu from a CD. Would work just as well from a USB stick. This sort of "live Linux" certainly works but it can be very slow to load and it won't have the full range of features. But it's certainly a good way to see if you like or hate a distro at first glance.