Is it possible to boot Win 7 from a SD card or USB stick?

if someone is used to windows then KDE would be an excellent choice so a Kubuntu based distro would be excellent.

also unity is quite easy to get used to once you start using it, so a standard ubuntu install would also be fine and as with any desktop manger choice you can also use a dock like cairo dock with it, which works nicely alongside unity.

also if you're wife is not very computer literate then it'd be much harder for her to stuff up a linux install as she would need the "root" password / account to make any changes + it'll boot from anything pretty much

with usb devices even modern motherboards can still have issues detecting certain flash drives so there still can be compatibility issues i'd just double check online to make sure the usb drive you want to use will work with your motherboard.

I installed linux on my parents computer after all the knew was windows, and they had no trouble using it at all, which i was surprised at.

 

Well, I dislike Unity . So that is why I said F Ubuntu with a clarification on the Unity. But (sorry for going a bit off topic). I would say, MATE/Gnome 2 is more like Windows (in the looks) than KDE or Unity. To a certain degree of course.

 

Just buy a damn HDD already. Since it's a handheld device it will have a 2.5" drive. Get a 40GB drive. Quite cheap and has enough room for an install plus a little bit of space for other stuff. How hard could it be to open the casing up? Surely there's a video on how to do that somewhere.

Windows install disk put on a bootable 4GB stick and you're good to go.