My husband was struggling with Win 7 after using XP for so many years. We re-installed XP but now we can't get anything to work. None of the browsers will let us install anti-virus. The only thing we can do is get his emails but we can't access the internet for anything else.
I got a puppy disk but we didn't install it, we only put in the disk to try it to see if it might be a good fit for my husband.
It seemed to be ok but it didn't boot up to install it. I called the seller and was on the phone with him for 4 hours but all that resulted from that was that Ubuntu 7.10 might be better so he is sending us that disk. Meantime, I tried to install the puppy program on my Win 8.1 Dell Inspiron 3847 to a second hard drive installed in my computer chassis. The Safe Boot I guess is preventing me from even trying it out in Ram.
Need some help in getting started and some helpful links that might get me out of my dilemma.
Thanks

Hello and welcome to the forum

Please note this forum is introductions only. I've asked a moderator to move this to an appropriate forum.

Regards...

Greetings Astrovel.

Hi Astrovel and welcome to LQ!

Regarding the older computer, the system specs might be helpful here for people to offer some advice. There are distributions which work well with less RAM and older hardware. Usually things like the video and network are the biggest hassles, but also the largest impacts to user experience. Many times I've found that distributions which have been around for a while tend to have older versions which work well with older computers. For instance if the computer is circa 2009 and you find a release of Linux which was about 2010-2011, there's a good chance it may work. I feel that is the idea with the Ubuntu 7.10 version they have suggested. I do hope that this person is not repeatedly charging you either. Things like ISO files which you can write to a CD, DVD, or USB thumb stick are all available from the web and it turns out that you need to do a little bit of research to learn how to make a boot capable media from the ISO files and also a little bit of research to know what ISO files you may wish to download. Please consider that if you happen to be, being asked to continually re-invest more money to a third party.

You are on the right track, trying live distributions on that system to see what can work.

On the Dell Inspiron 3847, I feel you may benefit by learning how to disable Safe Boot. I would recommend you perform a web search with the terms, "dell inspiron 3847 disable safe boot install linux", or instead of "safe" use "secure". There seemed to be tons of solutions and rather than myself say "here, use this one", I feel you should evaluate those, read them a bit and choose the one which follows your boot scheme.

Best of luck. Please update with the specs of that older machine and let us know how things are going with the Dell.