I’m lucky employer used them.

In reply to a post by gomezz:

Never got round to it ... need to first find the USB cable that connects to the portable hard disk I got to to save my data from last time I changed laptops. It has one of the funny USB connectors that was around for a time before USB 3 became the thing.

Oh yeah, i hear you.

Desk is littered with varying types of USB connectors..

Universal eh

Done the deed and hit the button on a new W11 laptop with the prospect of having newer hardware including SSD hard drive making it a lot more responsive than Mr Sluggy I am typing this on.

That gives me two projects to work on: Setting up the new W11 laptop to suit me (ie disabling all AI functionality) then try installing Mint on the old laptop. If they both go well may then well install Mint on the new laptop and wave goodbye to Windows for good.

Good luck with getting rid of AI on windows 11, they are renaming it now on different apps., It is a shame that MS just don't stick an I don't want AI switch in settings.

As for Mint or any Linux, it depends on what you do with your laptop, I know a few people who use Linux for different things, making music, 3d work, video editing, some graphics design work and office stuff.

Linux itself is fine, if you get a distro you like, the main thing is the desktop, the main problem, with Linux is the software. The UI on a lot of it looks old, like something from Windows 98 days. But if you can get past that then the software works fine for the most part.

I think I said before the one thing I do on my W10 laptop that I can't do on my Android phone is use get_iplayer.

I did manage to kill AI on my new Android phone in December and from what I can see I can keep it out of my hair (what is left of it) on W11 too.

Got the initial set uo done in remarkably short time this morning. Just got to transfer over the rest of my user data such as my music library and set up get_iplayer.

One thing I did find worrying was that the initial account transfer from my old laptop set me up as an admin and it took a bit of head scratching to figure out how to set up a separate admin user account and then use that to change my usual account to standard user. Worrying for more naive users who may not even think that this is something to do and leave themselves more open to attacks, Or with W11 am I unduly concerned?

Installed get_iplayer yesterday evening but struggled to understand how to set up the file naming format I prefer. Those guys really need a technical author to revise their help documentation! In the end just copied over the options file from the old laptop which did the job. Looking at the settings in there bears little resemblance to what I was seeing in help. Goodness knows how I worked it out in the first place all those years ago!

Also need to copy over the history file to tell it I don't need to download all those old programmes I already have.

Mmm! Installed the same file renamer utility as on the old laptop and somehow it automatically picked up the macros I had set up on there. Outlook and Firefox etc reusing the same user set up based on the account login is one thing but I am at a loss as to how this little app did so unless it was based in using the same IP connection? Or was the set up file included in the OneDrive backup and restore?

The config file is probably stored in the documents folder in your user directory which by default would be back up by OneDrive. Some of the games I have on my laptop do the same so moving to a new laptop would keep the save files.

As long as it is not an unexpected spooky or sinister action by the system but a normal part of moving to a new laptop.

One thing I have done is unlink my phone which at first seemed a good idea but in practise was more of a pain. For example deleting files on the phone in File Explorer put them in a Recycle bin on the phone - not what I want. Instead done the usual of adding the phone as a network device which means file deletes / moves / copies go back to working the way I am used to.

Now moved the rest of my user data not part of the OneDrive process - basically my music library,. Finally got round to using the 1TB external disk that I original got all those years ago when intending to use it to set up my now previous laptop from the one before that. It quaintly has the short-lived USB-3 socket but came with a USB-3 to USB-A cable so no compatibility problems there.