free laptop

hello ,we have been given an old compaq evo laptop ,which seems to have run on win 2000 pro in french ,I have no program ,recovery disks etc. and it will not boot into windows ,all I get is a light blue screen with a win 2000 pro logo ,my wife took it to a pc repair store that told her that the hard drive was empty and did not have an operating system installed on it,now the problem! my daughter has claimed it and wants to start using it for her midwives degree course ,but as i have no idea if this thing is any good .I do not want to spend money on win 7 ,when I may end up purchasing a new laptop for her .So does anybody know if there is any free operating systems that can be used,To be honest I know nothing about laptops ,so any help would be very greatfully received

Just put a free Linux OS on it! It's old, and probably slow, but there is a Linux version that will atleast give you an operating system. Try Linux Mint or ?

Others here will soon give you links, how to's etc. That old laptop "could" be functioning before you know it!

From what I know of an "old Compaq Evo," it probably has something like 256MB of RAM or less. Most of the popular, modern Linux distroributions like Linux Mint won't be usable on it. I'd recommend Puppy Linux:

http://www.puppylinux.com/

Depending on what you do and don't know already, you may be facing a learning challenge, but you're in the same situation that turned me to Linux, now my OS of choice for about 95% of usage. I have an old IBM Thinkpad with only 192MB of RAM, and Puppy runs circles around any of the Windows products capable of running on it. It's still pretty slow, but definitely usable.

Ditto to the above.

I also had an 'old' laptop and loaded Linux.

It worked fine and it has all the web, doc, email, etc utilities available that most new computer users want.

Do it when you have a bit of time to spare. It is not something to rush at - particularly once the Linux gurus around here smell meat!! You will not lack in advice and it'll be good advice too.

Tony

Hello ,to the people who replied thanks,it does seem that I have quite a learning curve to find my way around this new system ,it will keep me quite for some time ,many thanks
prter