A friend of mine got a new laptop for Christmas, and gave me his old (five years old) one.
It’s Windows XP installed on it, but only 128MB of RAM, and (apparently) a 6GB hard drive. (I’ve never heard of a 6GB drive, though. Perhaps its an 8GB drive and WinXP just doesn’t even count the space it resides on as being part of the drive?)
I don’t recall what the chip speed is.
But things seem to go much slower than they should at any chip speed I can imagine the computer would have.
I suspect WinXP, hogging all the memory, is slowing things down. And being so big on the hard drive, I suspect it has more instructions to read to accomplish things than an older OS would have, and so that may be slowing it down as well.
Am I right? Will installing Windows 98 on this thing most likely speed things up?
Do I also understand correctly that there’s no way to install Windows 98 on this thing without having to reinstall whatever programs are installed on the machine?
Third question, sorry: Can I install Office XP on a Windows 98 system?
You can put Winows 98 on it if you wipe the entire drive. It should be faster but Windows 98 is a pretty crappy OS so there is some tradeoff. Office XP will work on it (just looked it up) with Windows 98. There are such things as 6gb hard drives especially for laptops.
You could put a linux version on it with OpenOffice for almost free and that should be speedy too.
I am told Linux is kind of hard to use if you don’t know alot about computers. I know alot about computers-running-win-XP but I take it this is not the same as knowing alot about computers.
For example, on occasion I have discovered some neat-o program I just downloaded requires me to compile it before I can install it. These programs go to the trash can. I tried figuring out how to compile a few years ago, but gave up in disgust.
XP will bring older notebooks to their knees. A notebook with a 6 gig drive is probably in the 400-550 mhz range. A 500 mhz machine with 512 megs of RAM might run XP barely OK but it’s still likely to be pokey and the remaining drive space will be minimal. Win98 is not as bulletproof as XP, but it will do the job for the majority of stuff you want to do and is likely to more compatible with the older hardware.
If you can get more ram in that thing (512MB at least) you should be fine with XP as long as it is around 600 Mhz or better. You can configure windows XP to not use many of the functions that can slow down an older machine… things like changing to a classic UI rather than the default XP UI, disabling unneeded background services, and other things. Here is a good site that has many recommendations for tweaking XP for performance optimizations:
I’ll also echo others in recommending that you get AVG and AdAware installed. Download, install, and use Firefox as well.
I’m running XP on an 800 MHz machine with 128 MB of RAM right now and it runs ok. XP takes up 1.31 GB on my disk (I just checked) so you should have plenty of disk space. There’s no reason you can’t run XP on that laptop.
I’d take a look in the task manager and see what is running. You could have spyware problems or you could just have too many things running in the background.
I’d also take a look at how much free disk space you have. If the disk starts getting full things will slow down in a hurry.
A laptop with a 6GB drive probably has as low as a 300MHz processor. I used one for awhile with Windows 95 and Windows 2000 before upgrading it to XP. It isn’t good for very much with only 128MB. Even with 256MB, you can’t expect to run very much in the background, like virus scanning. Internet Explorer can use a lot of memory, so even web browsing can be slow. Maybe Mozilla or Opera will work better. It worked fine as a web server running apache though. And it works reasonably well with Linux.
I’d go for wipe and reinstallation of XP - even without a connection to the net, Windows installations just get slower and more buggy the longer they live - usually as a result of software being installed and uninstalled, leaving residual files and settings.
I think the real question is what do you plan to do with this computer? If you’re looking to just write some email, surf the web and perhaps jot out a few letters, then 98SE would work no problem. If you plan on using a PCMCIA card with wireless or anything with USB, you might want to stick with XP running slower.
If you do decide to make the switch back to 98, make sure you can track down all the drivers first. I had an old Micron given to me by my work and I revived it using 98SE. It took some time to find the correct sound card drivers for it. At the end of the day I ended up disabling the sound card because I wasn’t using it.
We have a winner here. Before christmas, my wife was doing most of her freelance writing on a Pentium 2, 266 MHz laptop with a 6GB Hard Drive and 96MB of RAM.
It ran Windows 98SE, and I stuck a PCMCIA wireless network card in it (SMC brand, if you’re curious). It had Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel, IE, and Firefox on it.
It was not fast. But it did what she needed it to do, namely write articles and do research via the internet. I was amazed when she told me once she had viewed one of those Realtor websites with a video tour of the house…it actually worked.
So, it can be a useful piece of hardware.
Yes, you will lose your applications by installing Win98 on it. And I’d recommend installing Office 97 or Office 2000 over Office XP. Each new iteration of Office, just like each new iteration of Windows, adds more code which takes more processing cycles to execute (besides, I find office XP much too cutesy and annoying with some of the junk it does).
WinXP would run really really really slow on only 128 megs of RAM. Win98 would most certainly run faster than WinXP will on this machine but the problem is that Win98 is tough to recommend for any sort of internet-usage now, it has lots of vulnerabilities. Most antivirus programs don’t even support it anymore.
If all you want to do is a bit of text editing and internet surfing, Linux is “modern” and would work, with FireFox and OpenOffice (it does Word docs!). But I doubt that any full install (like Fedora) would run any faster than XP does.
I wouldn’t bother to upgrade any hardware in a machine this old, just use it as-is until it dies. It’s not too difficult to find new entry-level laptops now for $500 from places like Dell, or $600 from other good online retailers.
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