[Fergal]

I have a Dell laptop (6GB RAM and Intel i5 processor) that crashed and is giving a blue screen error message, following an attempted update from Windows 7 to Windows 10. I'm not concerned about Windows on that machine and would like to make it a Linux machine. How do I go about doing that?

Thanks.

[mrki444]

You need to create boot USB or CD with some Linux version and install it, just like you would do with Windows. Try program UNetbootin. It's simple for creation boot USBs.

[Allius]

Hi!
Before you install linux (and you can do like @mrki444 wrote) I think you should try to understand what is causing that issue (blue screen). It can only be drivers, but also can be hardware issues like hard drive or RAM...

[darkthorn]

From my experience changing from Windows to Linux is a wise decision but only if you are not a massive player. Linux will run some games but not as many as Windows. Installing Linux is really easy, almost all distros allow you to record a cd and the installation is very easy, very much like Windows. If you are not familiar with Linux my advice if for you to go for Ubuntu, Linux Mint, Elementary OS for instance, all of these distros are user friendly and do not require much knowledge about the Linux OS. Also take a look at some videos on Youtube, there are many with explanations about Linux installation as also some very good reviews about some distros.

[Fergal]

Thanks everyone for your helpful replies and suggestions. I created a bootable USB of Kali Linux (as I was doing a little security testing at work) and it worked successfully. However, I plan on changing to Ubuntu soon as it looks like a more helpful distro for everyday use.

Something else I did was create a bootable USB to "Turn Your Old Laptop into a Chromebook" using CloudReady. It worked really well and has turned an old laptop into an excellent machine for browsing the web.