The only thing that's been keeping Windows 7 alive since Microsoft ended support for it was Mozilla Firefox, and now, it's over. In exactly one week's time, Firefox is finally pulling the plug on Microsoft's Last Great Operating System, forcing a few thousand holdouts who refused to switch to 10 or 11 to go dark forever. Not that it's a problem. Pretty much every other vendor ended their support cycles months or years ago, and those that haven't I'm convinced at this point are only sticking around to wedge open security holes to mine user data (e.g. Google Earth, EA Desktop).
As I've been chattering about for the past month or so, Linux Mint is the immediate solution. All it needs is a flashdrive and a single piece of software, and you can make a Linux boot disk. Since you've probably been using Win7 for a few years at this point and your hard drive is pretty much full of software and files, you'll probably have a bit of a storage space issue when it comes to creating a new partition to install Linux Mint into. The obvious recommendation would be "get a new hard disk with more space on it"—cloning your current drive and installing it onto a new one is still a bit outside my scope of expertise, so until I can research the subject and write a guide for it, the computer repair shop can do it for you. It won't be free, but it'll work better than anything I can recommend right now.
Of course, it's like I said before: if all you're going to use Linux for is the internet, there's really no need to install it at all; the live session will do just fine in most cases. Though, as I've discovered lately, it'll have a problem with USB WiFi dongles. You'll need to connect your modem to your computer through the ethernet port. And I'll say mi shebeirach for you if your computer and modem are in different rooms.
--25 August 2024--