Zorin 6.2 Lite on external usb drive

I tried to help an elderly (85+) retired school teacher who is limited to his Dell Dimension 4100 with 512 mg RAM, by installing Lite, only to find that his internal HD is only 20 GB and almost full. So I installed on the external storage drive, a very long process, only to be unable to get a GRUB screen at startup. Perhaps the USB drive is slow to spin, or maybe I put boot in the wrong place.
He read about the demise of XP and is quite worried, as that computer is his main link to the outside world. The plan was to let him get comfortable with Zorin, then terminate XP.
Advice appreciated.

Hi,

did you install the bootloader to dev/sda1?, if you installed it to the USB (dev/sdb) stick, that may be the reason why it won't boot, did you try just running the live CD so he can try it out and then wipe XP?.

Regards Wolfman

I would try the machine with Zorin Lite in live mode - that said I did try Zorin Lite on a similar machine and it got quite hot (Zorin 6 Lite). Zorin 8 Lite - I am not sure how long this support will last (whether longer than Zorin 8 Core I am not sure). If you do get 'heating issues' I would backup all of the gentleman's data to his external drive and go for either Trisquel or LXLE if you do get a 'hot' notebook - I noticed this even in 'live' mode.

Zorin 8 Lite - I am not sure how long this support will last

Is Zorin 8 Lite released

Oops! my bad! I see by the main website of Zorin no announcement yet of Lite, in which case I would try Zorin 6 as I don't think 7 is in the time-cycle of support anymore but happy to be corrected if I am wrong!