Thanks, looks easy... still why all the changes form XP? Rhetorical, of course. I'm doing this on a new Netbook and it is making me feel better about the need to replace my main machine, a notebook. The new machine will have W7 Home Professional I believe, 64 bit. Not sure I remember the W7 levels correctly, the Netbook has the Starter version, but I assume most of the usual user stuff looks the same.

Many years ago, I had a upsetting, disagreement with a close family member. That night I wrote a long, rambling letter bringing up every thing this person did from the beginning of time. I was upset and, maybe its a female thing, I wrote this ridiculously long letter using Word so I could password protect it. I had thought I would sleep on it and reread it the next day before sending. I didn't want to send an email. Well, needless to say, the next day the problem resolved. Everything was wonderful, I totally forgot about the letter. Long time later (maybe a year), I'm cleaning out my computer and find this cryptic Word doc that I couldn't open. I was deleting a bunch of junk. Then, I remembered that letter ! It was not something I would want on my computer (as life with this person was wonderful). So, I tried to delete it, couldn't. Needed a password. Had no idea what that could be. I was upset when written and heaven knows what I came up with. That letter still sits on this computer. I could never figure out the password. Back then, I thought I would have a new computer (this one is XP) and I would wipe the drive. Well I'm still using this machine and hope I can finally wipe it out and get a new machine. On another note, I worked in the medical field for years. Sometimes I would write letters for patients from home (rather than the office computer) in the evening to save time at work. I would password those letters, copy them on a flash drive and taken them to work. Copy to the work machine then delete from the flash and the home machine. Not ideal, probably not the best thing to do, but I did it. Any patient letters were always password protected. I sympathize with the OP as I've been there many times. If I did that now, I would write the password down. I didn't back then and never found a way to open that personal letter. I'll wait for Windows 10 then wipe this drive. Hope you find a way, Jane

A long time ago, I did a Mint Mate install(actual install, not live) onto a 16GB Gigaware USB flash drive. It booted slow as molasses and the first time running apps was just as slow. It ran fine afterward though. I considered getting a faster flash drive such as a SanDisk Extreme, but it wasn't it my budget at that time. I seem to remember playing around with bcd.exe but my memory is short. Some day I'll have to give EasyBCD a try. In the meantime, GRUB works for me. An extraordinarily boring (and embarrassing, mostly because I flubbed customizing GRUB2 because I'm too lazy to learn to use it properly right now) video of my installing Mint Mate alongside Windows 10 in a virtual machine... I suppose the point is that they can, at least sometimes, live happily beside one another. I was really expecting Mint Mate to offer to "install alongside windows" and auto-partition but it did not. Don't some other Ubuntu based distros do that? Or is it just full blown Ubuntu? Anyway, after all my stumbling, doing it incorrectly, redoing etc., Grub now reads exactly the way I want, remembers the previous boot choices etc. ... That's just a virtual machine though. I wouldn't suggest others try it on their real machines. I suppose if one were to practice setting up a dual boot system, a virtual environment would be the safe place to learn, right? BTW, I used Oracle's VirtualBox in the above videos. Free and open source. Oops, I just read the warning on the VirtualBox download page: "Please be aware that Windows 10 is not yet officially supported!" Oh well, seems to run fine for me.

Nice to see "Happy Campers".. was was hopeful as the load, long time as it was, seemed to load everything, all my history and some rather old drivers, e.g., Palm Desk Top. But over a short time, must be about the start of this thread date, the whole computer has bogged down, not just browser, both Firefox and IE, I'm not using the newer whatever-browser, but even the WiFi interface. I try to remember to shut down my WiFi when I am done, but leaving the computer on. Then I click on the wireless Icon and click connect. It is not a click, click, click operation, long (what 5+ seconds or longer) delay getting to each click. Wasn't that way in the beginning. I use a password as that is port of the IE security for saved passwords, I use a master pass word on Firefox.. suppose that's the problem? Wasn't in the beginning. Just before this exploration and gripping Firefox forgot all, I mean all, its personal data. I did a refresh on Firefox, then a restore on Windows 10, still total amnesia for Firefox. I have backup on a flash drive, but haven't plugged that in to recover. Seems houzz log on survived, must be something at the houzz end, not Firefox memory. On Linux, I used the Ubuntu GRUB to set up the dual boot, and right now I don't recall what the problem is... maybe it too slowed down, maybe there's something wrong with my mental clock too high an expectation. That possibility noted, I did some blogging on the Ubuntu forum, now a member, and there was some agreement on the problem. I have considered using XUbuntu to resurrect a XP Dell desktop that is very sick. But rather than dual boot, thinking using a USB Hard drive as the boot for XUbuntu and leave the Windows boot loader in tack. I think that leads to my too slow peeve. I suppose I may have problems with drivers too with Ubuntu.. I want to run my laser printers for one thing. The one dual boot I have worked "out of the box" with my WiFi.