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You can now give your old PC a new life by installing a replacement for Microsoft Windows Xp or Vista.

For most people who simply surf the web, read the odd email, and access a document every now and then, Linux Mint should be catering for most needs.

Included in the installation you get plenty of free software. Amongst these Open Office for documents and spreadsheets, Firefox as your webbrowser, and Thunderbird as the email client.

You need at least 4GB of harddisk space, and a minimum of 256MB of system memory to run Linux Mint, so most pc's/Laptops from the last century should be able to meet these requirements. In addition need a CD-ROM drive or USB port for the installation, but again this is standard in most PC's from the last century.

So, how do you go about installing Linux Mint?

1) Download Linux Mint "Image"

First you need to download the "image" which you use to create your bootable CD or DVD. You can download current version from http://tinyurl.com/36fm3e. Hereunder download the "Live CD 32 Bit" or if you wanrt some extra software you need to download "Live DVD 32bit".

2) Burn "image" to CD/DVD

Most PC's/Laptops have some kind of disk burning software included, so simply doubleclick on the downloaded imagefile to start the burning application.

3) Try / Install Linux Mint

Please note that installing Linux Mint will erase all data on that partition of your harddrive, so be sure you have a backup of everything you need from that machine before you proceed.

Insert the CD/DVD into the drive of the PC/Laptop where you want to install Linux Mint and reboot your machine. (You might have to reconfigure your PC /laptop to boot from CD/DVD).

When Mint is booted up you will on the desktop see the "install Linux Mint" icon. Simply click on that and follow the intructions for installation, or you can simply play around with Linux Mint as is.

Alternatively you can run and install Linux Mint 9 from a USB bootable pendrive by following the instructions on http://tinyurl.com/y87u7aq  (Obviously your PC/Laptop need to support bootable usb aswell to get this working)