Thanks but I have tried highlighting passages of your previous post and pressing quote button. However, the whole post is quoted in the reply box not the highlighted section?
I have full editor switched on.
Cannot see anything to upload screenshot except 'image' which links to a URL finder?
Regarding dual loading alongside windows.
Quote - 'It would look as though it is on a completely different hard drive even though it would actually be a partition on the single physical hard drive'
I think that is what Mint does - it should create a separate partition for itself alongside Windows on the hardrive (Where C and D currently are). My only worry was that if I delete everything on D or the D partition then windows cannot create backup files which I understood it does somewhere (on D or a hidden partition)
Quote: - 'I am not sure what you are saying about having programs loaded in C making your laptop run slower... Windows generally loads to C by default and it would generally not slow down your laptop at all to have everything loaded in C... It is much more likely that you have malware slowing it down... You may want to post logs in Malware Removal after reading the Instructions'
Somewhere I have read that C and boot loads quicker as it is near the core of the drive? May have that completely wrong. That is why Windows always put boot on left of partition?
I have checked for Malware consistently using ESET and MWB. Over months/ years Windows has become slower no matter what. I have even read that typically Intel processors strangle speed if too many windows are open?
That is why I will change to Mint being a much lighter system altogether, but I would like to keep W7 on the HD as backup. Mint say you can dual load mint and W7 on the same computer HD This can be done from the USB. I eventually want to move Mint off the Live USB as I want to use it as my main OS.
I also want to be able eventually to access W7 from the file manager in Mint and use Wine to run windows files and programs in Mint.
I would also ideally put all my personal files on a backup off computer before resetting W7 back to its original state before co-installing Mint on the same hard drive as above.
I used the Quote button to quote your post above (I removed the extra empty lines however... If I want to quote a particular part of your post, I copy it and then paste it in a quote box from the Quote button on the toolbar:
Thanks but I have tried highlighting passages of your previous post and pressing quote button. However, the whole post is quoted in the reply box not the highlighted section?
You need to copy/paste for specific quotes... I also edited your post to take out all of the empty space because it makes it harder to read your Reply while I typing mine...
Cannot see anything to upload screenshot except 'image' which links to a URL finder?
That is how most people will post images - put it on an image hosting site and paste the url into the Image dialogue... You can also click on More Reply Options and upload an image from there... The tools for that are below the Reply window...
I think that is what Mint does - it should create a separate partition for itself alongside Windows on the hardrive (Where C and D currently are). My only worry was that if I delete everything on D or the D partition then windows cannot create backup files which I understood it does somewhere (on D or a hidden partition)
If you create a new smaller partition either by reducing the size of D and using the area you reduced or by starting over with a format/reinstall and leaving a partition to use for Linux, you can avoid any risk of anything being overwritten... Most of the Windows backups that are done automatically are through System Restore and they would typically be on the C drive... If you want backups of your data, you usually need to set that up yourself and either put it on the cloud or some other place like an external drive... If your backups are on your main drive and that drive fails, you will lose your backups... If you leave things on D and then tell Linux to use that, you will lose whatever you have on D...
Somewhere I have read that C and boot loads quicker as it is near the core of the drive? May have that completely wrong. That is why Windows always put boot on left of partition?
I think you are confused about that... If your drive is a standard mechanical drive, where the date is on the drive could make some difference, but not within the range that you could tell - it would be nanoseconds... If it is a SSD drive, it makes no difference at all, but should load very quickly... I use SSDs as my boot drives for that reason... Either way, since Windows is the first thing installed in almost all cases, it has the pick of where to be installed on the drive and you don't need to worry about that... When you say to "put boot on left of partition", I am not sure what you are talking about... If you are talking about the way it is represented in some graphic, that doesn't really indicate how it is actually coded onto the drive - left and right really don't apply in the 3 dimensions of the drive... This is especially true if it is a SSD drive...
I have checked for Malware consistently using ESET and MWB. Over months/ years Windows has become slower no matter what. I have even read that typically Intel processors strangle speed if too many windows are open?
Speed will decline if too many windows are open, but that is dependent on the speed of your CPU and amount of RAM available... The more programs that you have to load at boot, the longer it takes to boot... Once everything is loaded, it usually will run okay, but if too many programs are running in the background, it can slow down your computer... Do you have ESET and MBAM both running in resident mode so that they are updating and checking all of the time?? If not, it would be a good idea to do that or at least to update and run MBAM every week or so... Windows generally won't slow down if you keep the computer clean and don't load it with a lot of background stuff... Do you run a firewall as well?? A firewall, antivirus and anti-malware are the 3 programs that really do need to be running background all of the time...
If you make Linux your primary OS, your system will likely run much faster simply because the load on the system is so much less... Having it load as a dual boot is feasible and would involve using some of your hard drive as a Linux partition... The Linux installer will probably set up the dual boot options for you... I haven't used Wine or Mint, so I can't tell you much about how they will work, but they should be fine if you set it up properly in the first place...
I would also ideally put all my personal files on a backup off computer before resetting W7 back to its original state before co-installing Mint on the same hard drive as above.
Another option would be to clean up your C drive, back it up and move whatever you need to keep on the computer from D to C... That way you could use the entire D drive to load Linux... If you can clear another 50 g or so on the C drive, that might be the simplest way to go... It can be tedious to do the clean up, but it might be easier than the whole reformat/reinstall thing...
