Installing on laptop that has Windows 11 installed

[NorthWest]

Jim43 wrote:

I can see some progress on the laptop screen, but there is no indication of how much of the new OS has been installed
....
the HP laptop is rapidly becoming a 'paperweight' until some new release of Linux Ubuntu comes out that can eliminate entirely all traces of the Windows operating system.

It sounds like you have managed to get the linux iso to boot, but not complete. It's possible to wipe the whole hard drive to eliminate all traces to the previous OS and then start again with a bootable medium. If you can boot a live disk, you could clear the hard drive with a command like:

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda bs=4M

(/dev/sda is your hard drive) which will lay zeros throughout the drive effectively clearing it. It does take some time to do this so you might want to add to the dd command the option: status=progress, which will show you some running stats of where it's up to.

You may also consider investigating whether there is a BIOS/UEFI update for that particular machine from the manufacturer and installing such an update if possible.