I just downloaded rufus and a mint iso, here’s a couple screen grabs.

Launch rufus, and plug in your usb stick, it should show up under device.

From there click select on the right side. Browse to where you have the ISO you got from the linux mint website and select it.

Once you get back to the other screen hit start.

You shouldn’t need to mess with any settings unless you are using secure boot.

Once that’s done, you should restart and boot from the USB stick. Depending on the model of your laptop there are different methods to get into the bios to change the settings to allow booting from usb. If it goes into grub mode it will look like a command prompt with a few selections. Just hit enter on the first option and it will boot into the live usb.

Once you are in the live usb mode, it’s basically all gui to install, test, etc.

Nowadays the terminal stuff is not really needed for basic use, so you should be able to get spun up pretty easy.

The process is actually simple.

It can be a little daunting at first because it’s new, but don’t let that discourage you. You can mostly ignore the whole mirrors thing, just pick one that is geographically close to you to hopefully get a better download speed. Outside of that, all the mirrors lead to the same file just in a different physical location.

Installing another software to make a bootable drive. You can use Rufus, which has a portable version so there’s no need to install it. I put a link below, there’s one in the downloads list that says portable.

https://rufus.ie/en/

There are plenty of step by step tutorials out there, however since Linux is very open, a lot of guides may give different advice and knowing what to/not to do can feel confusing. (For instance, if you have an SSD in your computer, you really shouldn’t use a swap partition unless you absolutely have to due to limited RAM.) In most cases though you can get by with the defaults when installing something like mint.

That being said. You could simply make the boot stick and try out the live version of the OS before committing to wiping any of your drives to install the OS. Just know that running the live version from the boot stick will be slow, it may take a little time for things to boot which is normal since you are running the os off of a USB stick.

If you would like some help I could try to give you some guidance. I would just want to know the specs/model of your computer so I can make sure I lead you in the right direction.

Capitalism baby. Can’t have you producing your own stuff when the corporations can sell it to you at 10x the price.

Hopping on a live USB to recover files is your safest option.

It will also give you an opportunity to scan files (with something like clam av) while running from a system other than Windows, so you’re less likely to encounter any further infections. Not that Linux can’t be infected, it’s just much less likely and you’d be running from a flash drive and off network anyway so it’s about as safe as you can get.

You would need to connect the live USB to the Internet to install clam av on the USB stick or something similar, but that can be done while using a separate machine before actually plugging into the affected machine.

I can’t really offer any advice on using any software for scanning as I keep personal things on separate drives segregated from the network so if something ever did happen I’d just wipe and start over.

May be a good idea to take though. Get him a USB drive that he can store files on and disconnect when he doesn’t need it.

Just some thoughts from someone that works in desktop support and has been tinkering for a little over 20 years.

Good luck!

Try using a USB boot stick to boot into Linux and just save whatever you need from the machine and then reformat it. Since this way the machine won’t automatically connect to Wi-Fi and potentially cause more issues.

That’s the quickest, simplest way without needing to try to diagnose and dig into the system to see what is affected and trying to fix it.

Also what is the computer doing when it boots up? There’s not really enough information being given to be able to provide any other advice.

Mustard, yes!

I love some good mustard potato salad.