Any Computer Experts Out There?

Ok, you have nearly half a terabyte (turn your head and cough!) in your C:\DOWNLOADS directory.

Are those programs you've downloaded and installed from? You almost certainly don't need those if so.

Click on Downloads and you'll see the square in the image be highlighted. From there you can find the heavy hitters. For instance, what are you storing there?

(Expand the DOWNLOADS directory by hitting the +)

__________________
Rules:

When women have a poet, they want a cowboy.
When they have a cowboy, they want a poet.
They'll say "I don't care if he's a poet or cowboy, so long as he's a nice guy. But oh, I'm so attracted to that bad guy over there."

Understand this last part, and you'll get them all.

No programs. Just video and music. I actually created that folder myself. I also do have the pre-installed Downloads (which also is full of e-books, audio files).

Cool, my old, old 11 year old desktop has Linux Mint Cinnamon 19.2 on it. I put the same on my wifes 12 year old laptop. I love it, no problems, no M$ spyware and very easy to use. I couldn't believe how easy it was for me to install, much easier than a typical Windows re-install.

......when you ask ten forums again, ask them what you can safely delete in C:\Windows

I wish I had my win10 system in front of me, but in 7 at least you can right click the computer icon, and ask the system to delete unnecessary files.

(did I give the link)?

You can then ask to delete unnecessary system files.

Yes, the Mint folks have a golden reputation for being careful.

I'm going to reinstall my system for the latest soon, but there's really no reason to, so I'm likely to hold off.

Linux is *not* grandmother proof.

BUT! My 83 y.o. mom is running it and THESE DAYS ALL MOST FOLKS WANT IS AVAILABLE VIA THE BROWSER.

It means that it turns into basically a Firefox or Chrome machine. LOL....which is actually great.

Keeps her out of trouble.

......................................mostly.

Do you ever post on the Mint Forums?

By the way CR, one thing you'll see is puzzlement on people's faces when you tell them how old your system is.

Having a fully functional and speedy OLD system is unheard of.

Many folks in the windows world dump their systems after a pathetic 2 or 3 years. That's just crazy.

The only downside is that right now, the older systems are 32bit only. Still can run Linux, but still, 4GB is a little limiting in terms of some of the heavy hitting software (IDE's, Video Editing, etc.)

....back to Matt. Do you need to have video on your system? Is it something you edit?

You might be in store for a larger harddrive anyway, *or* an external one to offload the lesser accessed bulky stuff. In fact, an external is probably what I'd suggest at this point for you. Get a 3TB or something USB3 SSD and call it day, unless you need it physically inside your machine.

Did some; very rarely. I bump into a unix vs linux issue more often than not and have to "update" my intuition-set regarding linux. lol.

Yeah, my computers antique But I've upgraded the hardware to keep it going. It might only have an old Intel Duo Core processor, but I upgraded that to 3.4Ghz and increased the ram and added in a Nvidia GPU, so it runs pretty smoothly. I've never been one to toss tech just so I can have the latest & greatest, I don't have the money and I get real satisfactions keeping old stuff running

I actually deleted 115 GB's in the last few days.. I don't really have any other options, since I am broke, no debit card, Day 19 of the flu (or COVID?).. Besides video, audio, photos, word documents, I have no use for this thing. I did manage to play my Age of Empires II (installed it on the thumb drive) to kill a couple of hours earlier.

Ok, so system is ok enough?

Matt, if you have a USB flash drive (thumb drive) you can download a Linux OS onto it and use it in 'live mode' without actually installing it on your computer, it will run just from your flash drive. That way you can try it out and see what you think and it's free to download. There's tons of how to install Linux Mint videos on youtube.


This one is good and you wouldn't follow the last part of the video where you actually install it on your harddrive. The only thing you risk is some time and not much time either.

It will have to do. It could be worse. If this goes bust, I'll have no internet.

Thanks CR.. If things get worse, I'll probably have to do that. Do you know off-hand how much space it would require?

Well when/if you have kids, you can build them one of these eventually (for games of course, sigh). It's the system case I built (water cooled CPU and graphics card, yadał)....

Not my actual system, but same Corsair 570X case, fans, etc. ASUS mobo / 32 high speed gig / 1080Ti / (eyes gloss over).... Not the baddest system out there by the current whackjob enthusiast standards, but still a wonderful thumper and fun to make. Every game can be roughly config'd at max settings and 2560x1440/144fps.

PLUS I'm not tormented by Dell giving me a system case that's murder to upgrade.



The funny thing about this was that as I started building it, my goal was to make it "a strong but not crazy computer". As I went along, I discovered I was having some kind of bizarre tech version of midlife crisis.

LOL

1.9gb
Most any flash drive is that big. You do have to format the flash drive first so that the ISO file can be written to it. That video I posted covers that.

Here's the download page. If you do this, you'll want Mint Cinnamon 64 bit as you have a newer computer.
https://www.linuxmint.com/download.php

CR, on your computer did you install Mint over NTFS (your computer HD, not the USB)?

NTFS will "work" with linux but will have file permissions issues sooner or later. You really want Ext4. This means a reformat for Matt (or format conversion.....horribly dicey).

And that means he'll need a place to store his stuff in the meantime. :-/

During the Mint installer, I choose 'Erase Disk and Install Linux Mint' and that then automatically formatted the harddrive to Ext4.

Wise.