Windows 8.1 Laptop Threw A Wobbly - Windows 10 Made It Worse! Any Options?

[Ian McCallum]

For reasons best known to itself, my Win 8.1 laptop threw a wobbly yesterday morning and I lost my wifi connection.  After many hours of trying different things including regedit, services, etc, I ended up installing Win 10 over the top of Win 8.1.  Everything looks okay, but then I realised that some of my files dating back over a decade has been corrupted (amateur radio contact logs).  Apart from that, I saved what I needed to and the laptop has been reformatted.

My question is, I still want to use my laptop for astrophotography, but only for controlling my RPi through wifi or network cable and image processing.  I'm reluctant to buy any new version of Windows, but I was wondering if Linux had anything to offer?  My only experience of anything remotely like Linux is Astroberry, etc.  The way I work at the moment is to use my smartphone as a mobile hotspot, the RPi and laptop connecting through that.  My other question would be, what options do I have in a tablet, just incase I don't want to use the laptop anymore?

[RT65CB-SWL]

Not related to the OP question, but few weeks ago my Windows 10 laptop (and occasionally on my iphone & iPad), threw me a wobbly whilst on this site and another GB/UK astro-site I frequent, and that it would log me out if was viewing to replying to a topic... then re-login. So damn frustrating.  In the end, I had to temporary disable my firewall. 

I do dabble with Linux [and MacOS too], but not sure what the best option is to offer the OP.

 

P.S. I now call MS-Windows, 'Windoze' or 'Winwoes'. So frustrating when you get everything in Windows working the way you want it... then kaput! 

Edited August 24, 2022 by Philip R

[knobby]

Zorin is a nice easy Linux to try, you can load it into a thumb drive to try it out.

[Starflyer]

You may be able to download a fresh copy of the Windows 10 iso and use your win 8.1 licence key, make sure you install the same version, Home for 8.1 Home, or whatever they called it back then.

Or you can purchase a win 10 pro licence key for around £10.