ContributionsMost RecentMost LikesSolutionsRe: Comment on Windows 11 your experience If you have already had Win10 installed on the laptop, then you should be able to install it from media created with the media creation tool. You should not need any keys. If you are keen to keep the laptop out of the bin, then I'd suggest replacing it's hard disk drive with an SSD. That will make it much quicker. My Wife's old Sony Vaio laptop of the same vintage with a Core i3 CPU is perfectly usable with Windows 10. My personal daily driver is of the same vintage too; that is running Debian and does all I ask of it. I'm perfectly happy with it, and I prefer it to Windows. It did struggle when I was working from home and using it to run slack calls and do actual work, so I wound up buying a new laptop to do that. But now I'm working for a company that have provided me a laptop, my own new laptop is not used and I keep thinking I should sell it. Of course, because I'm perfectly happy running Linux on an older machine, that doesn't mean everyone else will be. Sometimes you just have to try things out and see if they work for you. Mint should be little bit more user friendly than Debian - only in that you need to download the 'unofficial' version with non-free firmware and make some more choices in the installer. If you are curious about whether you can use Linux, you have nothing to lose by trying it. Either way, I'd pop an SSD into the old laptop as that will make it much more usable and useful, even if it is just as a spare machine. Re: Comment on Windows 11 your experience Sorry for the inconvenience that you've experienced. It sounds like you have re-imaged the computer from it's OEM recovery partition? If you create Windows 10 Installation media (search 'Create Windows 10 installation media' using your search engine of choice and down load the Microsoft Windows 10 Media Creation tool, you will need a spare USB stick), you should be able to reinstall Windows 10 on your older computer. My personal preference is to save everything crucial to a NAS (or in my case Linux file server) which gets backed up nightly to another identical NAS (again, in my case file server). I don't store anything important on my desktops/laptops. It did cost a few £££ to set that up but it massively reduces the risk of losing any data. Re: Comment on Windows 11 your experience Can't thank Microsoft enough. When they backported telemetry from Win 10 to Win 8.1, that was my cue to ditch Windows all together. 🙂