I spent several evenings in vain attempts to fix the Windows on my
wife's Lenovo Thinkpad R500. It not the best nor the fastest notebook.
But my wife wanted a valid replacement for her R61 machine (the R61
died recently). She wished to have a good keyboard and a big screen.
The machine we got has a big screen bud the keyboard has issues: the Fn
key makes strange sounds (but it works) and the "3/#" key is dead (also
the F1-F4 block is useless but is is not a big deal for her).. This is
still OK. But the OS behaved strangely - it randomly opened a help and
refused to put it in background. It also started many Internet Explorer
windows randomly. I tried some tricks like making of new user accounts
but nothing worked...
So I have replaced it with the Ubuntu 16.04 (I had it prepared on an
USB flashdisk so I have used it) and installed the MATE desktop (the
same that my wife uses on her main computer). So far it works better
than the previous OS. Of course the computer is not too fast with the
Ubuntu - at least when compared with my Blackbird - but it is fast
enough. The 1.8GHz Celeron and 2GB of RAM make it much more powerful
than the poor old R61, though.
