Just fired that off, Mang,, WOO HOO what a great deal thatd be if this works out,,

Justin,   your snail is mailed.   I double stamped him to get him to slither to you a little faster (catch a fast ride on a turtle or something).

You got a sampler disk with several distros to look at and the handwritten disk is the stuff I am using right now (recommended for best support).


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Youzguyz, I don't know about that locally loaded email stuff any more, I have a mail.com account and a gmail.com account -- I've been in the cloud for email for so long I don't even remember how the old local loaded stuff even worked.

Since I am recommending that you do a dual boot (keep your old windows intact and in one piece) I guess you would just have to reboot and go to your old stuff and get it when you needed it.

You could set up Thunderbird or any of the other Linux email clients and you could import your old stuff.   Or you can move your email to the cloud with a gmail.com account or a mail.com account.

I don't have any email issues because keeping mine in the cloud means I can get to my email from any pc anywhere or from a phone if I need to.

(and yup, there's an android app for that)

My email set up meets the Big Three Criteria.   (Free, easy, robust)

Well, here is the operant theory anyway.

XP is going to lose close support from MS next month on the 8th.  
When this happens, things may become dicey with XP unexpectedly at any time.  

Or it could run smoothly for months and years, it all really depends on what you catch out there on the web.

To give you a second PC home to fall back to (just like the list has a backup list in case of emergency) I am going to coax any of the XP persons out there through a dual boot set up on Linux Mint Mate 64 bit version 17 aka 14.04 or Querida (or something that starts with a Q and ends with an a).

The only benefit from all of us being on the same distro is close support in case of questions (there will be many, I am sure).

Ubuntu will drop their general release version of 14.04 on April 17th and Mint turns theirs loose a day or so later.

This will be a 5 year supported Long Term Release which is carefully tuned for stability and no bugs.

I have had good luck simply going from Mint Mate LTS to LTS as I am not looking for great exciting change, but instead for just keeping up with the codex and driver changes in the industry fairly closely and primarily really really wanting ROCK SOLID performance and no hassles.

Mint Mate LTS gives you all the modern graphics and codex and various proprietary drivers properly cooked into it from the very beginning AND it gives you ease of use.  

Plus it looks and tastes a whole lot like XP, which is very much on purpose I suspect.

By following along and setting up a dual boot machine, you will not lose any of your old XP functionality or saved files or anything else -- until it dies a normal death by root kit or whatever.   You will be able to select Win XP at the boot prompt and all will be unchanged when the boot finishes up.

Until the inevitable finally happens and something munches your XP stuff beyond redemption.

Then you reboot, tell it to go to Mint Mate and roll on ....


You will find you quickly become able to do most all things just about as easily on Mint Mate as you could on XP.

You get to keep the best of both worlds while you are learning, which makes it about as painless as it can be done.

OF,my computer is an emachine, i bought reconditioned in 05, amd  althon64 processor , XP.Will linux definately run on it?

My old white box was a first generation Athlon (the very FIRST true 64 bit processor rah rah) and it ran Mint Mate just fine for many many years.

Folks run Mint on some very old slow hardware, much older and slower than yours.

http://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?t=628

Kirill hit the nail on the head, if you stay away from complex 3-D graphics super-intensive programs, you are fine.   What kills you there is the graphics as you are likely resource sharing with a minimal on-board video system on any of the e-machines.

I have a question. When I download that mint mate file , do I save it to my computer ,and then burn it to a dvd? or is there something else involved because it is an ISO file? Thanks!

Mint Mate is the version I should use ,isn't it?

I have the original nero software that came with my computer . Do you think that will do it?

unetbootin (http://unetbootin.sourceforge.net/) can be used to create bootable usb drive.