New member install problem

Hi,

I installed Zorin 6 on a desktop successfully a few months ago but now have hit a problem trying to install on a laptop.

It is admittedly an old laptop - a Sony Vaio PCG-8Q4M, probably about 8 years old, with 512mb ram, 80gb disk and Win XP installed and running fine. It cost me nothing as I picked it up this week from someone about to junk it at the tip because it's old and slow, plus a few keys are sticking.

I downloaded Zorin 8 Core and burnt it to DVD on my desktop PC, however it does not get past the first screen when trying to install on the laptop. It boots off the DVD and gives me the Zorin menu with options to run from the DVD, perform a full install etc. I can tab down to full install but when I press enter the DVD works for a short while then stops and nothing happens on the screen. From this point it is locked up.

After this I decided to burn a new DVD using the laptop's drive in Win XP. I checked the MD5sum of the ISO download and it matched that on the website, then I burnt the DVD using ImgBurn on the laptop, this worked fine at 1x speed and verification. However, on booting from the DVD it did exactly the same as before, locking up after hitting enter on the initial screen. I tried both full install and live mode from the DVD.

Does anyone have any idea what could be going wrong? The laptop does seem to run as expected under Win XP, apart from the few sticky keys of course!

My knowledge of Linux is very limited, although I do like it on the one desktop I've installed to and it seems to run fine there.

Steve

You would be better with Zorin Lite but none of the releases are currently up-to-date. You may want to see how you fair with LXLE - remember, always try a distro that runs live before installing to see things work correctly and don't overheat your Notebook! If your old Notebook runs very warm/hot in live mode it will probably do the same after install. I found LXLE to run 'warm' - not as hot as 'Zorin Lite'.

Linux is fairly new to me and I'd not heard of LXLE, designed for older computers. I just downloaded it and will create a DVD on the laptop drive as it makes sense to me to create the DVD on the drive which will be reading it, I hope.

I had seen comments elsewhere that people have managed to install Ubuntu on the same specced laptop as I have so I'd hoped Zorin would work, if I can get a version of linux running then I'd think about upgrading it to a massive 1gb of ram. Being an old and free laptop it's not critical, but would be fun to see how much life I can breath back into it!

If it helps, I am running Zorin 6.4 LTS on 2.6gb cpu 1gb of ram and 10gb hdd, and it is presently my OS of choice. It was crashing a little bit so I disabled part of compiz and now is going well.