If you are set on changing, go with the mint 16, its already to go and you can do the dual boot and learn Linux before 17 comes out.
Heck I went with mint 15 and am having fun with it.
But if I were you I would get all my passwords from you favorite sites (redo them if you have to) and put them in a file named something you will remember (cookie recipes or something silly) and save it on the laptop or thumbdrive .
You will create a new login name and password for your mint.
Really its easy peasy, I put in the thumb drive I copied it to and used my windows to open it and it installed from there on its own.
Selected the dual boot / partition and off it went.

I've not seen a tablet with wired network yet.  I am sure there is one out there somewhere but I haven't seen one or an advert for one.

Art Webb wrote on 03/30/14 at 11:30:29:



Modern stuff, you lay in bed and talk to it to write something.   I have done this lots of times, watched movies and TV in bed too.  

If you still sleep with your wife, she won't appreciate the talking or the TV and any other stuff though -- she doesn't even like me reading in bed because I will laugh at stuff sometimes.

I don't think any mobile anything has a Cat5 jack on it -- it is all wireless Wifi, LTE radio and short range bluetooth nowadays.

You can't buy a printer that won't do wifi printing from a mobile device any more.

My Samsung Galaxy III phone has totally done spoilt me for all old style devices any more --- it literally does everything and the little 5" screen is clear enough to watch a movie in bed (it is up close to your face after all).

oldNslow wrote on 03/30/14 at 06:06:15:


Having had XP die on a dual boot machine, I can tell you exactly what can happen.   You will boot up XP to go do something and you will be going about doing it on line and suddenly everything will act strange, mine grew a few extra lines on the browser for a Yahoo ad bar and changed my default browser and all my click icons suddenly led to strange places now.

A standard reboot to XP failed, repeatedly.    A reboot to XP's Safe Mode damage control module worked, but all the bars and icons were still messed up.   I tried to go to System Restore, but found I suddenly didn't have any restore points, they were all wiped and System Restore was deactivated as were all my anti-virus programs.   Not even Malwarebytes would run.

So, I rebooted to Mint and did some investigation and found that there was a fix and I tried to do it, but my boot sector on my Windows drive C:  hard drive showed that it had been damaged as well.

So I just continued to use Linux for months and months -- next time it came time to upgrade LTS versions I just gave it the whole hard drive.

Odd thing, Linux never did report anything bad about the boot sector at all, I think the worm was mebbe just lying to XP's detection programs.  

Or else Linux just does the whole thing so much differently that the damaged areas were just marked as bad and the Linux format tool just went on past the scrambled sectors of the hard drive.

Who knows?   The evil thing blew my Windows completely out of the water and even killed the Windows drive C: but it didn't even scratch the paint on my red Linux suit.

What will happen to you will likely be similar.

No browser installed, not going on the web -- then yes, your XP will last much longer.

Your only sources of infection then are locally installed media and the infamous around the elbow attack.

How fancy can an around the elbow attack be?   Very fancy -- here is just one example.

There was once a D-Link router that ran on Linux that wasn't locked down as far as where it could go in your machine.  

Some clever boy out there was participating in attempts to turn a common D-Link router into a linux PC box (and yes, you can do this) and he though, "Why don't I use what I now know to stick a root kit into the wide open Windows drive C: boot partition from the router's open accesses and permissions to the entire machine".   And he did.

Mind you, he couldn't play with the Linux partitions as they were all locked down in the kernel, but he could side door into Windows Drive C: while the PC wasn't even technically "on" or if it was "on" not technically doing anything.  The router is always on and always connected to the PC and at that time all of its resources.   The actual computing was taking place in the router itself (all routers are little computers BTW).

His exploit got plugged by Linux, and by D-Link and by Windows very very shortly.

Also, if you ever agree to go to a site or agree to download ANYTHING no matter how innocent (say a free software tool or a game) then don't be surprised if other things can sometimes come along for the ride.

Clam AV (the free Linux anti-viral) simply says that you need to have it running on your freestanding Linux machine "to protect all the Windows machines that you may eventually touch or share a file with".   Linux can't be harmed by much, this is true, but Windows is a notoriously easy target to get to from the Linux side.  

So, using Linux to get at the Windows machine is a well known pathway.

Sandboxing (as used by Chrome boxes and books) is another trick to keep contamination from going from Sandbox A to Sandbox B to Windows drive C:

Chrome OS keeps all activities separate by running a separate complete small fast little red Chrome guy in each locked down separated sandbox.   Here they are, see how each little red Chrome guy is standing in his own separate little private sandbox waiting for something to clobber upon.  



Chrome OS works like that, very secure and virus proof as if one little Chrome guy gets tricked and overcome by something nasty out there on the web then the other little Chrome guys are not affected by it at all.   That one sandbox gets closed and scrubbed, the rest stay open and healthy.  Each tab (or open web page) is in its own separate little world.  

The overall OS schedules a powerwash (OS full chksum reload) at the very next boot if there is an incident seen in any sandbox.   And since Chrome OS is so small and light, this only takes 20-30 seconds to do.

Chrome OS has a very rigorous design and enough layers of backup protection that not much is every going to make it through the layers.   And some of these layers of protection are in and actually part of the Google Server Farm structure that does a lot of the heavy lifting in Chrome OS's world.



You might fool a little red Chrome Guy, but can you fool Google's huge constantly updated Server that your program filters through?    

Nope, didn't think so.

Clam AV's purpose for being isn't limited to dual boot machines -- any Linux machine (free standing or dual boot)  can pass on an infected file or program to somebody else who down the road may eventually touch a Windows machine on further down the road a bit.

Clam AV runs in the background, you never have to do anything to it once you tell the software manager to install it and all it does is flag out files (data or .exe) that are infected with any known malware agent.

Since I put Clam on my earlier box it only flagged out one bad file once when I plugged one of my wife's college professor flash drives into my Linux box's USB port to back up the files.

Some student had caught something from somewhere and was passing it back to my wife stuck on to a turned in report.

hmmm
so if I go with a tablet I'll need wifi not real happy about that
my smartphone is an LG=L38c with I think a 3.5" screen, I could be happy watching vids and movies on it, but not going to forums or chat rooms, where I'm not sure how big a screen I'd need to be happy (my PC monitor is standard size I think, 14.5" diaganol
if my phone was big enough to do my forums, etc, I'd simply turn off my standard internet and do it all mobileweb

so if modern  devices you talk to, does that work like the dragon thing, where I could talk and the device would type? don't think my phone will do that