Windows OS what is to like?
Today my wife's Win10 laptop threw a wobbler in the middle of a Zoom tutoring session. It became a bit intermittent at relaying both sound and video over Zoom and the software for a plug in graphics tablet bombed and recovered into French, having worked for many months in English. As the machine died bit by bit we decided to shut it down by the only thing we could, holding the ON/OFF button down until all signs of activity stopped.
Then we found that it would not boot up, it gave odd messages from the BIOS and then got as far as requesting the keyboard language. It then went into diagnostics but failed to do anything except open a command prompt window which showed stuff on X: drive, mostly empty files. None of the diagnostics actually worked and neither did others found in the instructional Youtubes. Nothing would persuade it to change to C:
With a great deal of help from a friend we have got as far as getting a fresh copy of Win10 onto a new hard disk in the machine and it now boots into Windows. We still need to reload all of the software used on a daily basis and all of her files. I know that they are all on the original hard disk as they can be read by my Linux Mint machine, a disk caddy is a useful tool. The recovered Win10 laptop won't read the original hard drive as we can't satisfy the file ownership/security in the system. If we read the files into the Linux Mint machine and put them onto a USB stick the Win10 laptop will read them in quite happily. It just takes twice as long plus some.
My good friend, who fixes PCs, has seen this happen before, several times. He always finds that when everything is put back together the machine goes back to working as it did before. There is nothing wrong with the hardware to be found. Nor the software, apparently. it just has a meltdown from which it cannot recover or report the error.
Does anyone know where I might acquire a laptop without a preloaded copy of Windows? I want to migrate all of my activities to Linux Mint........
Rans6...........