She wants to get rid of the Spanish edition of Win98 and replace it with a newer (English) version of Windows, which she has. I’m not sure if the newer version of Windows is ME or 2000.
Anyway, i know that i could probably just put the new Windows disc in the CD and install over the top of the old OS, but i’ve always been under the impression that it’s best in cases like this to format the HD and do a fresh install. Especially when, as in this case, there’s nothing on the HD that she needs to keep.
I’ve done this sort of thing before on a desktop with a floppy drive, but never on a computer that only has a CD drive. Firstly, will it be possible for me to format the HD without having a floppy boot disc? I haven’t used Win98 before. It is possible to get straight to the DOS prompt and type in “format: c”? Also, will the computer have to be able to boot from the CD drive? Anything else i should know about this?
Assuming you can boot the laptop from CD (a pretty safe bet) you should have no problems with a fresh install. The install CD should pop up a query along the lines of “This drive is already formatted in the FAT16 system. Do you wish to reformat in FAT16, FAT32 or NTFS?” At a minimum, go for FAT32.
Forgot to say, that you might need to juggle the boot order in the BIOS - it’s probably set up as HDD, FDD, CD - meaning it looks first at the hard drive for a boot track. If it doesn’t find one, it then looks for a bootable floppy, and if no luck there, looks at the CD-ROM drive.
As you have a live and healthy installation of Windows on the hard drive, you’ll need to set the BIOS to hit the CD first - probably CD, HDD, FDD. On most Dell computers, the Del key brings up the BIOS setup. If not, watch carefully as it boots for a clue, or go to dell.com and search for “latitude c500 bios” and that should bring up the relevant info.
And before you do the clean install, be sure to back up all critical data. Also make a list of all the applications that you’d have to reinstall after the clean install, and check that you have all the CDs of the applications. If you’re reinstalling Windows ME, you will also need drivers for all the devices. Personally, I gave up Win Me long ago and am a happy XP user.
It going to be tedious to format it for ME or 98 without an external floppy. Most C500 and C600’s are 700 Mhz or above. You can do a boot install and format off an XP CD quite easily. Go XP.
You can buy USB floppy drives for 30-40 dollars or so if that’s the way you want to go.
XP takes up a LOT more hard drive space, and hard drive space on laptops is limited.
Laptops contain a lot of proprietary hardware, and you will need to be very careful to make sure that drivers for all of the hardware are available before switching to XP (quite often they aren’t available). I upgraded my work laptop to win2k and the sound didn’t work, which I didn’t give two hoots about since I use it for work and not for listening to mp3 files or playing games. The floppy drive on my laptop also doesn’t work reliably under win2k. It occasionally gives an “unknown” error code. When this happens, my only easy way out of it is to reboot into 98, copy the file onto the floppy, and then reboot back into 2k. I left 98 on the drive, with a lot of stuff stripped out, specifically to get around issues like this.
There are 2 product lines of windows. The first is called simply windows, and (excluding the old stuff) is 95, 98, and ME. The other is the NT line, which is NT 4.0, windows 2000, and XP. What gets you into the most compatibility trouble is switching across product lines, so switching 98 to ME is safe, switching 2000 to XP is safe, but switching 98 to 2000 or XP is risky. Both issues that I mentioned above apply equally to windows 2000 as well.
ME is a particularly crappy version of windows. If you have a choice, I’d recommend 98 over ME.
I just did a web search and found a few people selling used Dell Latitudes with windows 2000 installed, so that’s encouraging. Chances are the drivers are all available. XP should work also, since it is very similar to 2000.
No, in the realworld XP runs IE and office apps fine with 128 megs. If you have lots of stuff open switching between apps will be slightly slower than with 256 onboard, but for run of the mill stuff 128 megs is fine.
ECG does makea good point re talking your hard drive capacity. It should be at least 10 - 15 gigs - if you intend on running XP. Most C500’s and C600 should meet that spec. XP runs fine on 700 mhz + class notebooks. If you want to up the memory to 256 megs just in case, memory is fairly cheap.
XP is so much better than Me and 98 you should run it if you meet the realworld hardware minimums for decent performance. These consist of a 700 mhz + CPU, 128 megs of RAM and a 10-15 gig hard disk.
Eh? Just two days ago, I installed Win98 on a brand-new drive (a friend dropped their laptop and physically wrecked the drive) and had no trouble at all installing with a bootable Win98 CD and no floppy. The partition and format took nearly half an hour for a 7 GB drive, but was otherwise mindless.
My only regret is that I didn’t have 98 SE - it was just plain ol’ 98, but it’s better than the “click click, ook … click click, ook” of a crashed drive.