Instead of continuing to use Windows 7 or 8 as the old laptop's operating system, it might be a wise choice to install a lighter Linux operating system that could bring the old PC back to life. Of course, a Windows accustomed person cannot be advised to forget Microsoft forever and install a Linux distribution as the only operating system.
Furthermore, I don't even want to recommend dual boot procedures, both because they require a bit of experience, and because, if you think of a portable netbook or an older PC, it is likely that there is not a hard disk with sufficient space.
The solution is therefore to install Linux on a USB stick with " Live " operating system, that is, which resides in memory and does not write anything on the computer's hard disk.
Linux Live CDs had been popularized to sponsor the open source operating system so you could try it out without hurting it.
The live USB stick is the same thing, with the advantage that it also works on laptops without a CD player and which also allow you to use the pen space to save new data and modified files.
The less experienced could imagine who knows what procedures to install Linux on a USB stick which will then have to be made bootable when the computer is booted.
Luckily there is a program that does everything by itself automatically and that creates a bootable USB stick with Linux, whatever version or distribution you want (In fact, there are many different distributions of Linux).
Universal Netboot Installer ( UNetbootin ) is the most popular portable program for Windows Mac and Linux from which it is easy to download and install various Linux distributions in a system partition or USB drive without any need to burn the ISO of the distributions (ISO are the images CDs with the operating system installation files).
With Unetbootin you can install Linux on a USB stick .
The program is very easy and you just have to choose the Linux distribution from the first list and then the version in the second menu.
The list includes Backtrack, Ubuntu, Linux Mint, Fedora, Gentoo, Xubuntu and many others including Puppy Linux, the smallest one, of which I had written the installation guide.
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For each distribution there is a link to the system homepage and two lines of information.
Just insert the USB stick and press OK to start the automatic download of the Linux distro chosen and proceed with the installation in the USB stick (correctly choose the letter from the last menu).
Optionally you can select the USB image from the computer's hard disk to install from an already downloaded file or to try a version not present in the list.
A program similar to Unetbootin is Universal USB Installer portable application for Windows only.
Attach the USB stick (at least 2 GB) to the computer, start the program and choose, from the drop-down menu, the Linux distribution you want to install.
After the selection, you can select the download option which will lead you to open the browser and start downloading the ISO file.
After downloading you can indicate the position of the ISO image in step 2, choose the letter relating to the USB stick, choose to format it and then indicate the amount of space to reserve for the system in the pen (so if you want to use an external hard disk it can then also be used as normal file storage).
In the end, after a short time and with a very fast procedure, the portable operating system can be created .
After Linux has been installed on the USB stick, you can connect it to any computer by starting it from a USB stick, letting Linux run independently of Windows.
In this case you have to access the Bios to choose to boot the computer from USB (see how to boot from a USB stick even without an option from the Bios).
The peculiarity of Universal USB Installer is not only the amount of distributions and versions supported, many more than Unetbootin, but also the presence of Installer .
Practically you can create a USB stick that becomes like an installation CD of an operating system and that can be used to install Linux even in dual boot on computers that do not have a CD-ROM drive.
From Universal USB Installer you can also create a Windows 7 or Vista installation USB to install Windows from a USB stick.
