My Aunty has an Acer Aspire V3-571G-6602 laptop that originally had Windows 7 Home on it. Then Microsoft decided she should upgrade to Windows 10, all without asking her. Her machine was slow on the reboot and looked locked up. The auto upgrade to Windows 10 and the subsequent auto upgrades persuaded her that this was not kosher, but simply wrong. I lent her an older Lubuntu system, 12 years old, while I deciphered her predicament, and she started to really like the simplicity and speed of Ubuntu. Really, she only uses a browser.
There are a few Windows 10 backup options and they are a bit confusing. Some will work with a USB, while some will not.
Create a System Image: Windows 10 Image Backup
This option backs up your disk exactly as you have it. It takes the largest amount of space. I culled my Win 10 disk down to 51G and when I tried to create a system image it asked me for a disk no less than 72G! Also, this option will not let you use a USB key, so you’ll need a new disk. I had to format the USB key to NTFS, then used these instructions to create a network drive, on my Win 10 laptop, in order to trick it into accepting a USB key. In the end my 64G USB key was too small because Win 10 wanted 71G minimum.
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.
