I removed the hard drive on the note book computer and booted Mint with Mate live.

I booted Mint with Mate from a live DVD.
I then installed it on a 16G thumb drive.
That put 245,000 files and 4.7 G on the thumb drive.
That includes all the programs that came with Mint (many) and
a few of my favorites like Kolour Paint and joe.

BTW joe is a popular clone of MS DOS Word Star and it has been around
for 37 years and it still does things modern text editor will not do.

That leaves me with 11G for email files.

All video codecs come with Mint and the built in wireless works!

It also makes it more rugged for travel and extends the battery life.

If necessary I can hook up another 500G external USB drive I have with
all 15 years worth of newsletter files. (400G)

I was amazed that this works. This can save hundreds of dollars over the
cost of so-called "Air" computers with solid state drives. An equivalent Mac
"Air" would cost well over $1000 and not have a 4 core processor. I paid $349
for this 4 core Asus with Windows 7. Once you remove the Windows 7 HD you can set it
aside and put it back in to sell the notebook.

The slight draw back is it is slightly slower when first loading programs.

Paul Lamar