Okay, I received an Acer Aspire One netbook. I got it used with the intent of giving to the family. Intended use is email, internet, facebook, YouTube, and the occasional text document. Nothing fancy.
The only problem is, the guy I got it from installed a demo version of Windows 8 on it. It doesn't have the horses to run it, and as near as I can tell Windows 8 is a terribly cumbersome interface designed to work on a touch-screen cell phone.
I don't have a copy of Windows anything else laying around right now.
According to the internet, I should be able to hold down Alt + F10 during boot and this will bring up a hidden partition in the hard drive that will allow me to return it to factory original settings. Likely as a process of the previous owner removing XP and installing Windows 8, this function no longer works. It just beeps at me like a key is stuck down.
I can't format the hard drive from inside Windows, either. Nor, for that matter, can I find the old MS DOS command prompt so I can just type in FORMAT C: (I don't know if that even works.)
So what do I do with this machine? I'm thinking of installing a free Linux-based OS on it just so I can run it. I actually have a copy of Ubuntu on an SD card, but can't seem to get the machine to boot from the SD card instead of the hard drive to run it. Would a Linux-based OS serve this purpose? As long as I have a functioning operating system, Firefox, and Open Office it should function fine. (I don't know about installing printer drivers, though, as it doesn't have a CD drive.)
Help me out here. What do I do with this machine to get it running? The end users are even less computer-savvy than I am, so nothing that's going to require writing PERL please.