The machine is a notebook belonging to Hewllet Packard's HP Mini series, by itself an unconfortable thing. Add to that the ultra unconfortable Windows 7 OS. The result is the most unyeldy, anti-ergonomic thing ever devised! It's driving me crazy, given it's the only machine I have at hand right now.

Sounds about right. I've always been of the position that a big part of MS corporate policy is to drive users crazy and destroy confidence in their sanity so they will happily go along with whatever BS the Company decides to perpetrate.

Repartition and install Linux on the empty space. Keep your sanity. If you find that you haven't used Windows in 2 weeks, remove it. Something like 'dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda1' always gives me a warm feeling of satisfaction.

Take care.

Get a good size SD or USB drive and install what linux you want to that.
I have done it on something as small as a 128MB sd card out of a broken kodak camera.

http://forums.solydxk.com/viewtopic.php?f=27&t=1858

It could be worse by having Windows 8 on it.

That's just what I did some weeks ago. I took a linux CD install disk,
sent its image to a 4GB flash stick, after which i booted from the
stick and now I have the new OS up and running from the hdd. The fac is
though that the passwd to access internet fom win7 was entered for me
by the adm. this person won't trust me with the passwd. I have no choice then
than using linux for everything, save when i need internet I must
boot in win7. This situation has no way out, because i don't want to ask that
person to enter the password a second time. Themoral is,whether I like it or
not, I still depend on win for the commucations with the outside world.

Some years ago i also had this suspicion but gave the benefit of doubt kinda like before "if a lot of people believe something they might be right" thinking. But after some time with MS i see it could be true - too much unexpected twists where there should be pattern. Anyway i doubt it is limited only to MS - everything else also is infected with this.

Well, technically speaking, WEP can definitely be cracked, and I'm pretty sure I saw that WPA1/2 can be cracked as well...

Actually, I think that there is a way to view the Wi-Fi password in Windows. I found it accidentally when I was messing around with a Windows Vista computer. Look under the Network Connections section of the Control Panel.

Slackware 14.1 Xfce 4.xxxx

Trying to discover the password will definitely beyound my capabilities.

Doing Network Connections>Wi-Fi>Create, you can see several tabs: one of them is 'Wi-Fi', with a lot of parameters whose values I ignore. Another one is 'Wi-Fi Security'. If, here, I choose Security = WPA & WPA2 Personal, then I only have to enter a password.

When in win 7 the adm only set two parameters, one of them being the password. So perhaps, the above two tabs are the ones I should care about, and no others. What are the data I should present here, in the forum, so others can guide me through Network Connections>Wi-Fi> Create?