Well, my Linux experience has not been brilliant I must say. After all the dreaded warnings here and elsewhere about what will happen to XP as soon as support stopped in April, I did my research as carefully as I could and settled on trying out Linux Mint as a replacement OS. On fitting a new hard drive to my system I first installed XP (with all it's updates) and then installed Mint from the downloaded .iso file. The system worked and when instructed to do so installed itself as a dual boot system (using "grub"?). It immediately found my internet connection and updated itself to its latet version. So far so good. I soon found the equivalents of Office which were happy with my old windoze data files but then I attempted to install a driver for my Canon printer. There are two linux versions available, but neither would install. Of all daft things I then decided to install my desktop picture - one I obtained from the flightdeck of an A320 at FL330 heading north over Italy with lots of towering Cu below - you know the sort of thing. Although I managed to do this, it was impossible for me to find the hidden folder in which the file should be copied so it would appear at startup. No, all I got was a blank screen. To get the required image I had to tell it what to use and then it required a password to access the disk partition on which the file was located. This was taking too long - and I didn't have a printer anyway so after a couple of attempts I gave it up as a bad job and have now acquired a license for Win7 so I will be able to use its XP facility to run all my ancient software.
P.P.