I have nero express Version 6.Is that sufficient? It says as one of the options disc image and saved projects. I think thats the choice. How do you do a chksum?

You can buy a DVD from this place if you don't have a DVD writer on  your machine. My old dell reads/writes CDs but only reads DVDs.

$5.95 + a couple of dollars shipping.

https://www.osdisc.com/products/linux/linuxmint

Looks like they have all the various Minty flavors, but they are all still at version 16 and you want to wait until late April when they start to sell the DVDs for version 17 (which isn't out yet).

 
If you have a 64 bit processor you can load the 64 bit version of Mint Mate 17 when it comes out in late April.

All drivers in Mint Mate are already hooked up and running automatically when you do the install.  That (along with the fact it looks like XP) is why we picked Mint Mate.

Partitions will remain untouched unless you change them yourself.  If you do it yourself, simply leave some unallocated space for Mint to discover.  If you want Mint to do it automatically it will find the biggest blank spot and suggest it to you.

Since you geek partitions, you can shift stuff around using your favorite tools to make 20-30 gig of unallocated drive space for Mint to find.  I always found I could shrink an old Windows partition that I wasn't going to add anything to enough to put in a Mint partition since the required hd space/size needed by Mint was so durn small.

Linux is TINY ......  all of Mint plus enough expansion room for all you ever need or want in the future will go into 20 gig.  

.....  and this is less room than Windows takes up by itself.


=============


People fear partition work because they have heard horror stories of dead computers.  

You know what really happens?    

The idiot driving the keyboard tells the program to resize the partition in question and ..... nothing happens for a while (the program is busy moving all the scattered to hell and back files over to one side to make room for the resize).  

This takes 15-20 minutes or longer to do, hell a simple defrag takes longer than that on most neglected old machines, but the idiot gets panicky because he doesn't see anything happening .....

Then the idiot driving the keyboard gets all panicky/impatient and cold boots the machine (mangling his file allocation tables by interrupting a partition level activity).

.... oops, dead machine ....


SO .....

Do yourself a favor and defrag and compact any windows partitions that you have before you go trying to do any partition work.    

A fresh defrag and compact job makes for a nice clean quick partition resize job that takes MUCH less time to complete.

And once you hit "go" on the partition shrink -- go to bed for the night. Don't sit there watching at it & getting yourself all jittery and panicky.    

It will finish, eventually.


PS ..... turn off your windows screen saver settings and all your power settings and go to sleep settings, or turn them way way way up so the machine doesn't try to shut itself down in middle of resizing.

Update later that same morning  
I figured it out.  I'm on this forum using the Mint computer now.
Gerry


Hi Oldfeller,
I have been lurking through most of your recent post about OS's and such and enjoying them.  I used to play around with Linux back in the day when Mandrake then Mandriva were common and available distro's.
So I thought I would give Linux another look see and following the link you provided in the beginning of this thread I installed Mint version 13 on my spare newly formatted and new install of Win XP machine.  Updated the XP install as well as defragged the hard drive.  
Now I see that there is a newer version of Mint (16) that I downloaded and burned the image to DVD.
I went to install it with the intent of erasing the Mint 13 partition and installing Mint 16.
Problem is the only options I get in the installer is to erase the entire drive, install 16 along side of XP and 13 or create my own partitions.  I choose create my own partitions and I get into very unfamiliar territory.
Can you offer some guidance for creating these partitions?  I tried to just erase the Mint 13 ext/4 partition and install 16 to the partition but it asks me for mount points and I tried to use / but it doesn't like that either.  There is a long list of mount points in the drop down and I think it wants me to choose and set the size for all these mount point partitions?  I thought it would just be a simple 2 partitions, mint 16 and swap but I am not getting it I guess.  I wish there was jut an option to install the new Mint where the old mint was.
Any ways, thank you for any advice you can give.
Gerry

I think you need 512 megs of Ram to run the newest version of Linux Mint. Might be a different/older version that will work on your machine though.

kt97679 wrote on 03/04/14 at 09:00:49:


I did just this very thing with a USB drive, switched from Ubuntu to Mint. I loved Ubuntu 12.04 but this new interface and other problems just took the fun out of it. I did the Mint-Mate-Petra version. Runs a bit faster but the file menus are a huge improvement for me.