On Wed, 14 Feb 2018 11:36:53 -0000, "Andrew Mawson"
wrote:

snip

I deliberately chose a DC7600 (off my pile of them !) that DOES have a
floppy facia and drive as well as the normal CD/DVD one,

Ah, cool. ;-)

so I do have the
option of floppy transfer but it's a pain.

Because?

Sadly all my adventures running
Linux have ended with much confusion and a splitting headache

Yup, it can be like that and was for me, especially at the beginning
when it rarely worked out of the box. Nowdays though and on everyday
kit it can be ok (working with all your PC / internal hardware at
least).

The thought
of booting some operating system from a USB stick that will allow me to see
the DOS files on the C: drive and write CDs though does sound quite possible

It is indeed and I generally carry a bootable USB stick in my pocket
and a couple of bootable DVD's in the car.

As a good starting point I'd recommend a Linux Mint. It seems to be
targeted at ordinary users (not geeks) and the same image can be
burned to DVD or put on a USB drive.

I'd start off with the latest Linux Mint MATE (32 bit) as that has a
lightweight desktop:

http://www.mirrorservice.org/sites/w...mate-32bit.iso

I'd use Imgburn to put it on a DVD:

http://www.imgburn.com/

And YUMI to put it (and any others you might like to try) on a USB
drive.

https://www.pendrivelinux.com/yumi-m...t-usb-creator/


Check both will boot, work in general and can see the hard drive and
the rest should be pretty easy. ;-)

Floppy for the odd file in or out, Linux for yer bigger stuff. ;-)

Cheers, T i m

p.s. If you have a stack of spare PC's it might be worth installing
Linux (Mint 18 MATE 64 bit) on one of them just for the S&G's. ;-)