HP Pavilion

[bedway]

Now that Micro soft has discontinued support for 7 what O/S should I put on my computer.

[btulloh]

Windows 10. You can still get the free upgrade ev en though they don't tell you that. 

[KirkD]

Warning: Backup your data and settings before you attempt an upgrade. Some of the older Win7 machines won't upgrade and may leave you without a working computer. If it asks you for a product key select "I don't have on" and at that point you have a 50/50 chance it will self activate off of the bios settings on your HP.

[dgdrls]

Linux distributions,

Linux Mint is the distribution I use,
or Linux Zorin
Best Windows Like Linux Distributions For New Linux Users - LinuxAndUbuntu

make a bootable thumb drive
and you can try it before loading it to your PC

Much more stable, no Windows registrations or tracking and just as easy to use,
loads with Libre office suite,
Firefox web browser
All you need for a solid business computer or more,

D

[btulloh]

Do a search for microsoft   "media creation tool".  Download that and run it. It should lead you through the process. It will check your hardware first to see if it's capable. There are some potential snags, but it will inform you.  Sort of. If you're not comfortable with doingyour own tech support you may want to get some help. 

Win 10 does work well, but it has a little different flavor than win7. Personality I would prefer to stay with win 7, but that's not a good option at this point.

[btulloh]

Here's a detailed explanation.  Win 7 to Win 10 - still free

If all this sounds foreign to you, it may be a sign that you don't want to do this yourself.  Humans really shouldn't have to deal with this, but it is possible.

X2 on backup your stuff.  These days external USB drives are cheap and readily available if you don't already have something like that.  Personally, I'd clone the whole disk or save a system image.  Or both.

Good luck.  

[bedway]

I want to thank everyone for their input thus far. This old man is still pondering this decision as of yet.

[Ron Wenrich]

My laptop is on its last legs and I've been looking at some used Dells that are running Linux.  I put Linux Mint on a thumb drive when Windows 7 went out and tried it.  It takes awhile to load onto a thumb drive, but you'll get a good feel on how it operates.  Probably a bit more quicker than Windows 7.

[btulloh]

Linux distributions,

Linux Mint is the distribution I use,
or Linux Zorin
Best Windows Like Linux Distributions For New Linux Users - LinuxAndUbuntu

make a bootable thumb drive
and you can try it before loading it to your PC

Much more stable, no Windows registrations or tracking and just as easy to use,
loads with Libre office suite,
Firefox web browser
All you need for a solid business computer or more,

D

Really good suggestion. May be just the ticket. Well worth your consideration.

[clearcut]

Windoze 10 on an HP G60 series laptop (Vista, then 7) was simply too slow. The computer was unusable.

Tried Pop!_OS by System76 - also too slow on this computer, but it looked like an interesting distribution for a newer and faster machine. 

Used Mint 18 on a Mac mini and liked it a lot, but did not have time to really play with it for long. But that did lead me to PepperMint - a "spicier" version of Mint. It is supposed to be faster and lighter and optimized for web apps. Just set it up yesterday and only poked around. 

There are many Linux distros. Choosing which distro is one of the challenges using Linux, but most are similar. DistroWatch allows you to filter by the capabilities processor, memory and such for your machine. 

Most distros allow you to create a Live USB drive that you can boot from and try the OS, and install it if it works. 
 

[Ianab]

Another suggestion if you are handy with a screwdriver.

Download Linux Mint or similar, I prefer Mist as it has more of a "Windows" feel and I have to swap back to Windows all the time for work. 

Take out your existing hard drive and put is some place safe.

Install a nice new SSD (Solid State Drive) in it's place.
Something like this will work well enough for an older home machine.
https://www.amazon.com/ADATA-SU635-3D-NAND-Internal-ASU635SS-240GQ-R/dp/B07PLNNDL2
Boot off the Linux disk you created and install it on the blank SSD
Mint will install useful programs like Firefox and LibreOffice by default, and there is a heap of other more specialised programs available. 
Machine (any machine) will now run twice as fast as it did when it was new. 

And if you get lost at any stage, put your old HDD back in and you will be back where you started. Go and watch some more computer repair Youtube videos, and try again.  :D

[Ianab]

Windoze 10 on an HP G60 series laptop (Vista, then 7) was simply too slow. The computer was unusable.

Likely lack of RAM? 
Machines of that vintage likely only had 2gb of RAM, if you were lucky. 
Add in a slow CPU, slow hard drive, and likely a clogged cooling system causing it to overheat and downclock to stop catching fire... 
And all the bloatware that HP likes to add to their systems. 

And yes it's unusable. 

I've got a laptop that vintage that the kids still use, and it handles Win10 "OKish", but it's got 6gb of Ram in it now, and is a model with a dedicated GPU