My story:
I have an old Dell Inspiron 15R N5110 (with Windows 7 Factory install). The screen doesn’t work quite right so I use it hooked by HMDI to a large screen tv to watch videos, tv shows, etc. It stopped working... wouldn’t get to the log in stage. I tried MANY times to use a repair disk, my recovery disks and restore to factory default. No luck. All self tests said hardware is fine. So I put Windows 10 on a USB and tried to load that. It worked. Of course it doesn’t recognize that this was an upgrade and wants me to pay for it which I won’t.
A neighbour suggested an open source OS and google led me to LXLE Desktop as a good one for those who know nothing of these things plus I read you can make it look like Windows (but I think that was for an earlier version since it didn’t work for me). I got LXLE 14.04.3 to work (and it removed all Windows 10 stuff in the process). I even got video and audio to work on the tv. (Yay me!)
My new challenges are to have the tv keep going when the laptop lid closes and to have it go to full screen properly. I compensate right now by keeping the lid open a crack and by zooming video etc to 170% to fill the tv screen (but I think it blurs a bit.)
No matter these small issues I am thrilled to a working laptop again. Sorry for the long intro but that’s why I’m here and happily so. Thanks.
Yolanda
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