Gosh it's been four months but I've finally got a working system. I bought several Linux magazines with various distributions lots of which didn't run until I got one that would boot up. It was Debian 7. It worked really well when booting up from the CD. However when I tried to install it on the hard drive all sorts of snags developed. After at last getting the thing installed It wouldn't recognise my passwords. I tried to reinstall it (the plan was to carefully write down passwords and user names and the use of plurals is not accidental) but it then refused to partition the disk. Well hard drives are not expensive so I bought a new one, carefully wrote down user names and pass words and successfully completed the fresh install. On rebooting it failed to recognise any of my passwords. The mag in question was Linux Format. They don't answer the phone and direct you to a help website which won't let you register to ask questions unless you know a lot more about linux than I do.

Looking through some old disks I found a copy of Mint 13 KDE. This was a simple and fast install and it finds my internet OK. I'm astonished at how fast it is to boot and at how fast the browser is.

I've found equivalents to all the software I used on windows and there are loads of games available. Happy days. Now all I need is some cooler weather.