Some years ago (5 or 6 ?) we bought my OH a laptop at Currys. It was and is an HP Pavilion with an Intel I3 processor. After several sessions with it she rather lost interest – she has not become a cybernaut in any shape or form, and when we moved house the laptop came too but has seen very little use – virtually none, and has not been switched on for possibly 2 years.
Today I resuscitated it as it occurred to me that we ought to know if it will run Windows 11 or not. So I dragged it and its power cable downstairs, plugged it in and ran it. Before I got that far, the battery fell out. I replaced it but I do not seem to be able to lock it in place, which is a bit odd.
It powered up after a long period of thought, and then announced that it was either rebuilding,or updating, the BIOS. I had no idea this was possible from within the computer, and would have thought the machine would have to go to a specialist for that sort of thing.
To cut a long story short, it then proceeded, as I expected, to update itself. I brought it downstairs at about 2.00 pm. It has been updating since then and at the time of writing, 8.25 pm, it is still “restarting” and the dotted wheel is rotating steadily. If it is still at it at bedtime I shall close it down and continue tomorrow. In this time I could have installed Linux Mint and have it all up and running with all my favourite programmes installed. Windows has become a bit of a liability rather than a simple, everyman’s sort of operating system.
The eventual outcome of the above came at about 10.30 pm when the final Windows update finished downloading and installed itself.
