Well you see we have tax free “back to school” for a whole month, and one category is computers under $1000.00 so why not see what we can do; I have not gotten a new one in I think 5 years.
Unit chosen is an Asus vivobook, from Costco with “free” anti virus and support uh huh. Comes with windoze 11 already installed. So I fire it up and it demands to connect in order to proceed. Find a m$ account for my long dead tomcat, and log in. Doesn’t look too bad, and seems to be fairly easy to get along with. Dismiss all the extra s**t as the windoze will not see much use.
Next task: Load Linux. My choice is Linux Mint, Mate edition. Download an image and write it to a USB stick, then boot it.. Attempt to install stops because windoze is using BitLocker and that needs to be turned off. Not too difficult it seems. Now install and we are reasonably up to date. Slight issue with updates as there are a hundred or so packages since LM version 22.3 was released. All of that takes 10 or 15 minutes, and a re-boot recommended. The installer automatically sliced up the disk, leaving about half for the windoze.
Back to the windoze partition… Here we check for windoze updates and wow what a difference! Something like a couple of dozen needed, but in the process, several re-boots and one “plug it in” (for bios update) were required. A good 2 hours I would say, patiently watching and booting and going in the loop again. So I see that micro$oft has learned little, and they will certainly waste your time. Micro$oft365 and McAfee total protection were both included with the computer. Sure hope neither tries to charge me in a year because I have no use for either one.