Be wary of using a Lenovo product. Lenovo has put in a lot of twists and turns into their BiOS. One example is the necessity to use Lenovo-specific drivers, etc. I've restored several Lenovo laptops which I bought at yard sales and flea-markets for $5 or $10 because "they were busted". They weren't but in all cases the batteries were exhausted, the power input socket was broken off inside the laptop frame and they had no hard drives.
I opened them up and fixed the power supply socket with superglue; easy peasy. Batteries can be had for about $30 which are compatible with the Lenovo. I have a lot of surplus 300~600 mb SSD drives purchases for a few dollars each at a bankrupt company fire-sale. Some even still had Windows AND corporate information on them. I have a set up to plug them in and wipe them; Plugged them into the laptop then did the Mint install. Again, easy-peasy.
Your explanation of your access to the internet sounds like a Third-World or Fourth-World situation. Since you don't now have a DVD capability, know that a separate DVD box is available for about $20 and plugs into the USB ports for power and data transfer.
Don't try to over-complicate your situation. Determine the problems one-by-one and fix them.
I've been working with Linux since there was Linux; and I am a certified Linux Systems Administrator, so I know most of what I am talking about.
Without doxxing yourself, tell us where you are located physically and what kind of Internet connections you have available. That information will help us to narrow the focus of our support for you. And BTW, trying to D/L Netflixs and anything else at the same time over a crappy connection is a definite non-starter. Step one: reboot your computer and only connect it to D/L your Linux ISO (Mint Preferred). No email, no web browser, no pR0n, no chat programs. Dedicate your connection to just the download.
Let us know how it goes for you and we will continue to help.
I found my USB boot drive but I couldn't get it to recognize on the Lenovo. I found out that I had to disable something in the security. At the moment I can't recall what I had to turn off, device something or other. The way I was able to get the drive to load was: I started at once by pressing the f12, got to the boot screen and saw nothing. Escaped out, rebooted it (first taking out the thumb, drive inserting it back) then hitting f12 and it showed up. I was able to then load on mint 20.3 and have it on a live disc. Now I'm kind of scratching my head about RAM. Crucial scanned my computer and told me the type of ram that I could get and new SSD with a little bit more room. The ram they were specking was 3200 MHz but the scan showed my computer at 2666 MHz. From what I was reading the ram with the higher number will dumb down to the ram with the lower number. But I've also read that that could cause some issues. This is where I scratch my head because it's way above my pay grade which isn't much as you've noticed.
If you now have Linux operting as a "Live" version (i.e. running the OS from the USB drive), you will see in the upper left corner of your screen the icon which says "Install". If you are ready to install Mint on your Laptop and don't care about anything which is already on the hard disk you an click that Icon and the instal will start.
The installation menu will give you the choice to totally reformat the hard drive and place Mint on the drive as your only OS. That is the best choice if you (as I said) don't have anything on the existing hard drive you wish to save. The process will reformat the hard drive and install Mint and after that process is complete a message will present on your screen to remove the USB or DVD and then press enter. The laptop will then reboot into Mint.
If you have documents, files, folders on the hard drive you wish to save, then there is a process for that but more complicated.
Let us know.
No I'm waiting for a different hard drive. I don't want to do a dual boot because I had it break on me a couple years ago and it was a huge pain in the butt to try and figure that out. So now I'll just keep my windows SSD and a static bag hidden away until I need it. The other drive should show up tomorrow. I'll let you know what happens. So do you think that having ram that's a little higher in mhz isn't something to really worry about? I read people on other forms asking about that if I start to get too much heat coming out of the computer it can muck things up a little bit. Although I don't know if that's what will happen in this case, but I read that it could.
There's so many different variations of computer configurations which is a beautiful thing if you know what they do, LOL. I never thought about it much because I always got free computers. This is honestly the first one I bought since 2002.
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