Hi, I have an old HP Notebook - 14-an018au, which has 4gb ddr3 ram and runs windows 10 on a 10 ish year old 1tb harddrive. This is a secondary computer, but it has a lot of old files from when I was like 13 years old that I want to backup, but I also have like 300gb of space taken up on the harddrive. So things like my chrome history, app settings, and unique files I would want to keep, but the large apps themselves I don’t want to keep. Also this computer is impossible to work on with its current operating system, so something which is a quick solution please.
And also, what distributions would you recommend that would a) work on this old computer and b) might be kind of fun to mess around with, as a secondary device
Anyway thanks
You can backup your important files to the cloud or a USB.
It’d be pretty hard to backup app settings when transitioning to a different operating system. You can access the files from a live USB (i.e. booting into the install media) since Windows 10 files are unencrypted normally (unless you have bitlocker active), so you can access all your files that way. Getting your Chrome history can be done at C:\Users<username>\AppData\Local\Google\Chrome\User Data\Default according to some quick googling.
Overall it’s hard to give you advice on how to transfer data from a computer because I don’t know what exactly you’re stuck on.
This. Also, the requirement to get all unique files (guesses OP means personal files) can be hard. In theory, OP should just copy out C:\Users<username> but this also includes a lot of junk from apps. And often, it makes no sense to copy everything, like Chrome, where you’re only interested in a small part of the data and not all the cached objects. Chromium based browser profiles are huge, often with hundreds of thousands of files. You would be better off exporting the data you need and importing them into your new OS/Browser. This also makes sure you can get saved passwords as these are not something you just copy out using raw file copy.
And finally, som uses (and apps) have a habit of saving files to other places like C:\Photos and C:\Movies but also dim things like C:\IntelDriverUpdate (made up name), that also makes it hard for a tool to find the personal files.