trubleshooting a laptop

[Douglas Pollard]

Hi All, My Daughter has a Dell laptop about 5 years old. It has been a
nice machine. She bought it used and it was slow as death. It had xp on
it and she took it to a shop and they installed windows 7 and either
added a memory stick or replaced the old on with no difference in speed.
I sent her an Xubuntu live disk for her to try linux with  the thought
that if it ran at a reasonable speed I would consider the problem is in
windows. She wasn't able to get it to run as she probably needed to
press the F12 key to run off her dvd drive or somethin. She is comming
here this weekend so I thought i'd try to get the devd to run Xubuntu. 
Also I would like to get her hooked on Linux.  Will running Linux off a
DVD tell me anything about the condition of the hard ware or soft ware. 
She needs Microsift office for her work.  I guess i could install it as
a virtual program in xubuntu couldn't I??  Any suggestions here would be
appreciated. She as talked about buy another machine but money is tight
for her in this economy so I am trying to help.  I may be all wet with
this but figured it might be worth a try and couldn't hurt anything.    
Doug

appreciated.
                 Doug Pollard, 
      Sailor, Machinst, writer,artist 
                Visit me at:
     
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