Computer Hope

Resurrecting old HP laptop with Vista Home Premium
You can ask why I'm trying to bring this old laptop back to life. For on thing it has a CD recorder. That said, it seems not to be working along with a few other things. I think the batter went totally dead while it sat in a closet. Trying to charge the battery is a no go.

I'm nursing my way thru problems. The main user name give me a message that says: The User service service failed the log on User profile.....
I went into the bios screen and followed a few instruction I found n the internet that suggested creating a new user. Now I can sign on as Administrator Guest or the new user I created. I tried assigning a new password as ADMIN to the original name that now give me the above message. It still give me that message. One of the fixes is to go into the registry and make changes. Is this my only option? And if so should I find the recommendation and post it here for your review?

I'm hesitant to try updating as I'm considering installing a LINUX OS. If I do try that is their any recommendations as to which version? I have Ubuntu on a laptop with an ATOM processor that is so slow it makes no sense to me that HP installed a HOME PREMIUM OS with such a slow processor and such a small amount of RAM. Ubuntu makes that ATOM processor work much better than it does on Windows. But somewhere MINT was recommended.

I'm ready for the flogging! <G>

PS My attachment of my PC info is too large so I'll type it out
HP Pavilion dv7 notebook 4.8 Windows Experience Index Intel(R)Core(TM)2 Duo CPU T6400
@2.00GHz 2.00GHz
PAM 4.00 64 bit OS