Thanks everyone. I guess I am just over whelmed with all this. I just got to feel like I could actually know what to do (most of the time) with my desktop & then I went & got this thing. For starters, I can't manage to find how to send mail on this IE7 screen. Don't know if it is the screen size (15.4) or IE7 or if I am just missing it. Between configuring the laptop, getting rid of all Dells extra tag ons, etc. I am losing it. Also, I have a webcam camera so I can talk with my grandchildren but after 12 hours of trying can't find anything to make it work. Googled & now I think that I have to download a separate program. Is that true & is there a safe one. Free if possible. Thanks so much - again. Debbie.

I didn't know MS was skipping 9 and going to 10 - thanks, Emma. Yeah, I'm a little leery about buying a laptop online without trying it first. I love the keyboard and feel/response of the touchpad on my current laptop, so I want to find something as comfortable. I think it's best I wait until Windows 10 comes out... it might be less Windows 8'ish; although I've been using W8.1 on a desktop, so I'm familiar with it - and I don't absolutely hate it, like many people do. I didn't dislike Vista (my laptop), either, like many people do. I actually like Vista. Guess I'm not too hard to please when it comes to operating systems - lol.

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.

Thanks everyone. mikie, that sounds a little complex. If necessary, I'll try it, though. An update... last night after posting here, I decided to try to get those Windows updates redone and out of 'stall' mode. So, what happened was the latest version of Windows 10 updated - it was a long one, took about an hour. After that, my computer is working like I think it should as far as speed with no lags. I haven't used it enough to see if that "HD Intel Graphics Display driver has stopped working and has recovered" popup happens again. So far it hasn't. While doing the Windows 10 update, I could see it was installing new drivers for quite some time, so I'm hoping that will resolve the issue. If not, it looks like I'll have to return it because it's really annoying to continually see this popup whenever I try to navigate the internet. I'll post back to report what happens. Thanks to you all for your help.