New OS?

Abracastabya

I have an old laptop which is slow as &%$#. Is it possible, to download and put a new OS, a lightweight version of something such as Ubuntu, delete XP and still keep all my files etc.. I have some pretty important stuff on it, or should I back up my stuff to an external harddrive and just wipe everything (which I don't want to do as I have office etc which I need for work)?

Help please..
Thanks.

Abracastabya

Abracastabya wrote: »

I have an old laptop which is slow as &%$#. Is it possible, to download and put a new OS, a lightweight version of something such as Ubuntu, delete XP and still keep all my files etc.. I have some pretty important stuff on it, or should I back up my stuff to an external harddrive and just wipe everything (which I don't want to do as I have office etc which I need for work)?

Help please..
Thanks.

Unless LibreOffice will suit then Ubuntu is a bad idea, no MS Office unless you could run it emulated in Wine or a VM.

It might need extra RAM if it's old. But if you go down the reinstall route, always back up your data as chances are you'll lose something you may not have thought of, in fact you'd lose everything if it was all on the same disk partition.

Capt'n Midnight

which version of windows / laptop ? - if Vista look at the sticky thread for speedups

XP can be faster than ubuntu if you have less than 512MB of RAM (ie ancient laptop)

if it's suddenly got slow then check for malware


if you have important stuff back it up regardless - there are two types of hard drives, those that will fail and those that have already failed

without knowing what you run there is no way of saying linux will suit you


if the windows reinstall option is a recovery disk beware that some of them wipe your computer

areyawell

Whats the model of the laptop so we can look up the specs. Might be riddled with viruses or XP might just a need clean install