In the meantime someone started a lawsuit against Microsoft that they forced him to throw both his laptops out and buy a new computer.

That is a way to do it, but it is easier, faster and more fun too: to go for another operating system.

Since laptops that do not run Windows 11 are not worth anything anymore I went from one laptop to four in a matter of weeks.

My own, is an MSI Leopard i7 with 16 Gig of RAM that ran Windows 11 already for over a year without any problem, besides that is was Windows.

I decided to buy a cheap, small laptop to play with Linux and so I got hold of an HP EliteBook i5 with 8 Gig of RAM. It came with Ubuntu and I started playing around. Soon I got Linux Mint on it, because I liked that more. And later tried Ubuntu Cinnamon on it, which is still there.

Then my partner gave me a laptop that would not run Windows 11 anymore. It was an Asus G750JS an i7 with 8Gig of RAM, a gaming laptop of ten years old, that still was going strong and I put Linux Mint on that too.

Neighbors asked me to help them with their new laptop and I asked what they did with the old one. Thrown out into the garden and into the rain. I could have it. After cleaning and drying it and installing an SSD I had myself computer number four. A Lenovo T450p, a Thinkpad i5 with 8Gig RAM. This one saw several different Linux distributions. It ended up with Linux Mint.

The MSI that ran Windows 11 was supposed to keep doing that. But fate (or was it Microsoft?) decided differently. One morning it started up with the blue screen of death. It would repair the stuff by restarting. Well, four restarts did nothing for me. But…. then it could repair itself from the disc….. Nice, then I would keep my data, right? Wrong! It took the time to do all kinds of stuff, restarting regularly, telling me not to switch off the computer.

Finally it was finished.

Windows had restored itself from an update-crash. But could you speak of ‘ restoring’ ? ALL my software was deleted: my website program, GIMP, MSOffice (even), Thunderbird mail, Firefox, Chrome and all, all other programs I put on there. And what had it done for me in return? It installed Edge, Outlook, Office 365 and a lot more, that I would never use and had to take off again. In the meantime I had fallen in love with Linux. So was I going to put a lot of effort in it, to really restore my Windows, of would I just run the live CD to install Mint? I did the last. Months ago and never missed Windows. And so I ended up with four laptops with Linux, all fully functional, while three of them would have gone to the scrapheap as far as Microsoft was concerned.

And I use all four of them. The MSI for my photos, the Asus for my writing and finances, the HP – little small, light thingy – for on my lap on the couch with feet up to write these texts and the Thinkpad for surfing and watching reels.

It is such a waste of money and of good computers, that I had the feeling I needed to put this on a website to tell people they have an choice.

Repair cafe

In the Netherlands there are repair cafes that help people with older laptops to install Linux on it.

If you have a repair cafe nearby, you can ask them if they can do that for you.