Daniel J. Kaczynski: It is gratifying to me that James Stephens’ articles not only convinced you to try Linux, you used them to make the change. Thank you for letting us know.

My solution is the following:

Buy an old laptop or get one out of the closet or from a friend’s closet. If it’s less than five years old, it will be fine. If it’s more than five years old, it’ll probably be fine, too.

Now get an SSD and install it. Linux is so much more efficient, that the operating system won’t take up much space, so a 240 or even a 120 Gb drive is usually sufficient. You have a blank slate now. You can keep the windows hard drive in a shoebox in your closet (ten years from now, throw it out).

Now get Linux Mint Cinnamon or Xubuntu on a USB flash drive. Lots of instructions on how to do it, or get a nerdy friend to do it.

Plug it in, power up the laptop, it will have to boot up the linux on the flash drive since there is no alternative. Choose the install options and never look back. It will be Zippy

You can browse the internet pretty much worry-free then.

One other thing about Linux:
The command line utilities make Windows command look like a joke.
There are all sorts of nice system utilities and tools to do things with files that require complicated 3rd party GUI navigation in windows.
ssh – contact other linux machines (supercomputers, servers, etc)
scp – move files around from other linux machines
screen – set up “daemonized” processes that run in the background (if you’ve got a long-running script or daemon.)
dd – copy anything to anything else, including raw disk information. Make perfect clones of hard drives with complicated partition tables and system flags.
tar, zip, gzip, etc – compress and uncompress folders
mount – mount files as drives, mount disk images as drives, mount drives as drives
cat, grep, tail, head – search across multiple text files

All the compilers
All the compiler utilities
nm – list out the contents of a static library (in Windows you need dependencywalker for that)
All the worlds server software

Sometimes the command line utilities are much faster. (Windows has alternatives such as PuTTy to do some of this) Sometimes it’s just convenient to be able to access something by remembering a name instead of navigating a complicated menu. I miss the command line utilities

It’s radically faster than the Windows 10 that I use for work (though I suspect that’s because that Windows 10 version has McAffees sitting on it like a 1000 lb gorilla.) I don’t have to wait seconds for an OS-API call to return for anything to happen when I click or change focus.

I still keep a hard drive with a Windows 7 installation on it for heavy Windows applications (mostly Solidwoks). I use it maybe once a week or less. One nice thing about Linux is that I can back up the whole drive image of that Windows partition and restore from backup using dd. I’ve decided to remove all the virus scan stuff from Windows and just use the image backup if needed. Now Windows 7 runs significantly faster and cleaner too. My new “virus-scan” policy, after decades of the “computer TSA” is just “keep backups” and do a malware scan every so often. I make backups weekly.

I do my heavy web-browsing from the Linux partition anyway.