Help with obsolete hardware.

Zarathustra[H]

Zarathustra[H]

Extremely [H]
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Oct 29, 2000
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Hey all,

I am helping my dad with his old laptop, and I'm about ready to tear my eyeballs out. I'd really appreciate some info if anyone has experience with these.

It's an old IBM Thinkpad 600 (type 2645 350)

Essentially it is a PII 233 and has been upgraded to 128megs of ram.

Its the type of laptop that has the replaceable internal drives. he got it with the floppy drive, and does not have a cd drive for it.

I keep telling him to just throw it away, but he does not want to hear it and wants me to make it work for him...

I'm considering trying to install w2k on it, but I can't remember how well (if at all) w2k will run on only 128megs of ram. Input please?

Since the computer does not have a CD I have two options.

1. Try to find a docking internal CD for this bsolete thing.

2. Get a USB CD drive.

I'm assuming #2 will be the easiest and cheapest, but does anyone know if this machine will allow me to boot from a USB cdrom? I can't seem to find the option to select what device to boot from in the bios.

Any help appreciated!

Thanks,
Matt
 
I would highly *NOT* recommend installing Windows 2000 on it. What you can do is take out the HD, backup any important data files he has onto another HD (there are adapters for notebook HD to normal sized IDE connectors), format it and copy the Win98 folder from a Windows 98 CD (if you have it), put the HD back in the laptop and install Windows 98 using the files on the HD. Restore files over the network, if possible and the situation is done.
 
Thank you all. I actually lucked out and found a dockable internal CD for the laptop real cheap on ebay so I solved one of my problems...

z-lite said:
I would highly *NOT* recommend installing Windows 2000 on it.
Click to expand...

Is this solely because of the ram? The official Windows page lists the requirements for these OS:es as only 64 megs, but I'd imagine that being completely unusable. I figured 128megs might actually do the trick, even though it would probably not run as fast as W98se.

There are two reasons I am itching to ditch Win98.

1. He wants to use USB devices on the laptop, many of which are exceedingly difficult to get working on Win98 or lack drivers all together.

2. Microsoft has stopped supporting Win98 so there are no more security updates etc...

I remember running Win2k Professional with 256megs of ram back before WinXP came out and it worked well.. I don't know if 128 will be completely unnusable or not...
 
128 meg would be fine to run W2K. However, not many programs run every well under W2K.

Having that said, a friend of mine used to own a HP that ran W2K and 98SE using only 128 meg of ram with a P3 667mhz :)
 
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