Even a decent driving rig can be had for under a grand. Way cheaper than almost any car.
monsterpiece42
joined 1 year ago
As other have said, please do an SSD swap.
If it's "unbearably slow" that is an indication of drive failure especially on old boot drives. Linux will not fix this.
After that, Cinnamon if they like windows. Gnome if they don't or don't care.
Pop os is a great "fire and forget" OS for normal users. I work in a computer shop and have seen tons of not-knowledgable people run it without issues.
Good, keep the prices low for the smart people who do.
That's the name of the program. You can search it and it'll pop right up. It is now owned by Cooler Master.
Once you download it, you can run either the CPU Srress test or the Linpack test (this is for Intel mostly as it is their proprietary test) and it'll run while looking for math or WHEA errors.
While you're doing science, I would also recommend doing a RAM test with memtest86+. You download the .iso and make a bootable drive, and boot into it. Both RAM and CPU can make similar weird failures so checking both is a decent idea.
Partially dead CPUs can absolutely still POST and boot. I work in a PC repair shop and see it all the time. Everything will work totally "fine" and you'll get weird errors here and there similarly to failing RAM. You have to run a dedicated CPU test like the ones in OCCT (Windows-based, don't lynch me) or similar to see if you're getting WHEA or other errors.
The reason for this is that a lot of CPUs have built in redundancy to get around having imperfect silicon, and sometimes that is enough to make the system still work, but not be quite "right".
The good news is, if you are producing such errors, you usually have a 3yr warranty on most CPUs and the OEM will RMA them for you.
This sounds like it was strictly the fault of the USB load. If you make a UEFI USB (you should use Ventoy, it's great btw) all you would need to do is shut off Secure Boot and install.
Most bootable drives don't support Secure Boot. You turn it off, do the install, and turn it back on if you want it. I personally just leave it off.
Outside of those caveats everything you described is industry-standard stuff. Nothing to do with Lenovo.
I work in a decent-sized computer repair shop and this is a very accurate representation of what the average user knows.
Just in case anyone thinks this is over the top.
Hey there. I run Linux on my daily but also work in a Windows-centric PC repair shop.
"Official" answer: You can move your key over to a new mobo by signing in to Windows with a Microsoft account, installing your new hardware, and activating Win 11 through the Settings->Activation->Troubleshooting (button)->"I recently changed hardware". And that will pull your key back down from your account. But it does lock you into an account.
"Unofficial" answer: you can absolutely update to Win 11 on old hardware. The easiest way is to boot a Win 11 iso in Ventoy. That works fairly often. You can alternatively edit the installer to not do the TPM check in the installer, which you can search for guides for online/YouTube.
Alternatively: you can hop on g2a, kinguin, etc and buy Windows keys cheap.
To be clear I know this is all bullshit, but it's options. Hope this helps!
I work in a computer repair shop and we rarely see any Thinkpads of any age.
Far from shit. And they have among the best warranty options in the biz
I used to drink this all the time as a kid. I tried it as an adult and it holds up.
Sounds nasty, but it averages out to roughly what is a carbonated milkshake. Not bad at all.
As others have said, I also highly recommend physically separate drives. I have found both Linux and Windows affect each other sometimes especially when you're getting your bearings with dual booting.
For instance, after running Linux the clock in Windows will be wrong. And Windows will eat the Linux boot partition especially after feature packs (formerly called service packs), which come out about 1-2/year.
I would recommend researching the terms "executive dysfunction" and "demand avoidance".
Demand avoidance is not the same as Pathological Demand Avoidance, which is a Autistic profile type, but maybe for fun look into that too!