My dear Aunty has an Asus Aspire V3-571G-6602 laptop, Win7 64 bit, 500mb, 4G ram, 5 years old (2012/07/04), Windows 7. She only uses Firefox for her email and for browsing. Windows 10 auto-upgraded, she says, without her permission. Furious was an understatement, when, during the install, Windows 10 froze. No amount of rebooting fixed the problem. Her beloved PC, hardly used, was non-functional. Somehow I let it run and after a very long while it repaired itself and came back to life. Microsoft did not make a friend of my Aunty this week, but hopefully she may warm up later. In the meanwhile she is using my Lubuntu 14.04 on a 13 year old laptop, and she really likes it! I am contemplating installing a dual boot ‘buntu, which she will use on a regular basis, but if she desperately needs Windows she can have it as well.
Puppy Linux Tahr 5.0.6 fits into 1G of disk space and runs well on only 500mb of RAM on an old XP box.
After playing with Puppy Linux, both the Slacko and Ubuntu 14.04 Trusty Tahr version, on CD, I decided to install Puppy Linux Tahr 6.0.5 as a dual boot alongside Win XP. The instructions online are not crystal clear to me, and left me somewhat puzzled, stomach ill at ease. Let me explain the process.
Puppy Linux can be used quite readily from your CD or USB stick. You need to boot up and then configure. I decided to dual boot install it on an old Win XP box, one with only 500mb ram.