...... it can be a major pain in the butt.
First, you got to go buy a new hard drive with enough capacity to hold all your stuff. For me, my Windows was 160 gig or higher for me, so the drive I bought before was a 250 gig because that's the smallest that was on sale at Best Buy that could hold my Windows and all my various windows stuff.
Windows always takes about 4-6 hours of steady work to reload the OS, reload all the software packages, finding the drivers for this and that, do all the configuring of this and that. Then you gotta update all the anti-virus and all the various maintenance softwares (and wait forever while all the MS updates slowly trickle through the ethernet cable in installation order so the system can actually rebuild itself in the proper sequence so it actually works right)
When you hit the snag (like a old CD that doesn't play any more) it can get more difficult and even more expensive, since you gotta go pay for some MS stuff again since your old stuff was 2+ generations back and they won't upgrade from that to there so now you have to buy a full modern copy and all the rest of that happy MS BS.
Windows and Office can be a real pain in the butt.
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Linux however, isn't a pain in the butt.
Hard drive won't read right any more, even the low level diagnostics from the disk manufacturer can't get it to respond well enough to pass the tests and although Linux CAN get it to read some it is still as slow as molasses as only half the heads seem to be working at any given time.
It ain't right and it ain't gonna get any better. Give it up, it's dead.
Jest take out the old 250 gig hard drive, slap in a 10+ year old 120 gig drive that had some encoded compressed backup stuff on it from a previous work life (useless now, the company doesn't even exist any more) and let Linux overwrite the entire drive.
Stick in the now completely obsolete and "unsupported" Linux Mint 9 CD from many moons ago into the DVD/CD drive, close the drive, hit the power button to cold boot the machine.
Disk reads fine, software loads, you pick "Install Linux Mint 9" and then you have to answer 7 simple "choose the radio button" questions and within 10 minutes Linux Mint 9 is finished loading
completely, OS and ALL the office software & all the stuff you ever used with Mint 9, all loaded off of ONE CD.
Never had to chase a driver once, never had to update a single piece of software (all done automatically as the stuff was installed).
Stick a jump drive in the USB slot that you used to keep your Preferences and Bookmarks from Firefox and a copy of all your personal data, copy in all the stuff into your personal folder and let Firefox go find its past history.
Done. It took longer to open up the old white box and change out the hard drive than it did to reload all the software.
1-2 hrs total ..... with Windows you'd still be dicking with getting the OS loaded and configured and driver'd.
..... did I ever mentioned I LIKE Linux Mint? Really, I spent less than 2 hours and zero dollars to get the whole thing back and the old used 120 gig hard drive is really huge compared to the simple needs of the Mint 9 system and it seems to be even faster than it used to be on the old sick hard drive.Now, why did my old drive die? I had a multi-boot arrangement with Windows as boot sector and something ate the boot sector and banged the hell out of the drive heads -- something very unloverly root kit-ish that attacks windows boot sectors no doubt.
So, I don't have a dual boot machine any more, straight 100% Mint 9 now and unless somebody takes the time to write something specifically against Mint 9, I'm good for "from now on" until "forever", whichever comes first.
And that's fine by me, I like my old Linux Mint white box jest fine.
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