“Skip Feren and go with Linux Mint 19.1”
Myself and a couple others here just went through this with a lot of work. Mint cinnamon version 18.3 is the best of them all so far. 19.x is having some issues with hardware.
Been thinking of you today. Saw this thread and realized it was the perfect opportunity to catch you up on the Linux Mint 19.1 install you and I did on my HP laptop.
As you know, it's been freezing up on videos. For that reason, I've hardly been using it at all, but today I let it boot up, and the first thing I saw was a bunch of available updates. I installed all the updates, and whaddya know. It hasn't frozen up on me all day (yippee!).
I hope I didn't just jinx it by talking about it, but if it does freeze, I'll let you know right away.
Thank you so much for all of your help.
CatOwner, Linux Mint looks and behaves so much like Windows 7 you'll hardly notice the difference.