I did this for 2013 - used Windows 7 because of the Toshiba brightness bug in Linux (until Windows rot annoyed me more). I started on PuTTY but rapidly switched

I did this for 2013 - used Windows 7 because of the Toshiba brightness bug in Linux (until Windows rot annoyed me more). I started on PuTTY but rapidly switched to Cygwin and ssh.