My son attended uni 20 or so years ago. He bought a top of the line Medion laptop, I think from Aldi. It was a 64bit Win7 professional with 512GB ram and 4M memory. He got a PhD writing his thesis on that laptop. I noticed the laptop was in a pile of stuff he was discarding. I asked if I could have it. He said ok, but that it was old, it was very slow and that the disk was failing. Well I upgraded an old Toshiba I had with 2TB SSD and 16M of memory and I loaded Linuxmint on as a dual boot with Win7. The Toshiba boots so fast and runs all the applications I need , email, banking etc so fast that I only turn it on when I need to do something. Being turned off is the safest mode I can think of a PC to be.
I checked the Upgradeable site to see if a Medion is supported. But nothing was there about Medion. However I saw the Medion disk and memory was practically identical to the Toshiba. The Medion was a 64bit machine. So I bought a 1TB SSD and 2x 4GB memory, I couldn’t find the max Memory a Medion could handle but I wouldn’t be surprised if it could take 16GB.
The old disk was failing, either that or MS bricked Win7, I know from past experience how MS slow the Win7 OS with constant search index building linking with strange sites and other unneeded functions. I completely replaced the disk with a blank SSD.
On the Toshiba I searched how to get a bootable USB with a Linuxmint install. I downloaded the Linuxmint ISO installed BalenaEtcher and used it to set up the bootable USB for Linuxmint., it was all very easy.
Installing the SSD and memory into the Medion was very easy as it has two very easily removed covers specifically to access the disk drive and memory cards. I put a bit of packing paper to fill the SSD as the ssd was only half the thickness of the old disk.
On the Medion I changed the BIOS boot order to boot from USB first, connected the P C to my LAN via a cable , booted from USB selected to install LinuxMint and it all just happened, I answered some simple questions like what language, what time zone and it all went very smoothly. I am not sure but I think it even downloaded LinuxMint OS upgrades.
I had an old 2TB disk drive that never worked properly but I plugged it into the Medion and it hums along so smooth. I had previously bought an Epson FastFoto scanned that I was using under Win7 dual boot Toshiba, but I found drivers for the scanner under Linux64 on the Epson site. Installed the drivers and updated the scanner software under LinuxMint and everything runs very smoothly. I also had a 7port Bonelk hub that had a UCBc plug, got a USBC to USBA adapter and plugged a mouse and keyboard into the hub. So I now got a zippy , I0 sec boot time, full fledged powerful P C to scan all my old photos onto my 2TB DRIVE.
Old PC with good bones was bricked by MS.
Now is a fast powerful very useful device.