Hiya!

I've just bought myself a second hand laptop (already have a very good desktop pc but needed a basic laptop for other things). It's a toshiba tectra 8200, pIII 850mhz, 256mb RAM, 20gb hard drive. It came without an OS so I need to put one on.

I have a copy of Win98 SE and WinXP Home. A computer engineer friend said that XP will be too much for the system, computer-nerd other half says XP is fine. I can probably manage to get a copy of any other OS. But which one?

Personally I am happy putting Win98 onto the laptop, I never had any problems with it whenit was on any of my old pcs, but engineer friend says that all 98 support (patches etc) is ending in 3 months time so installing it wouldn't be wise. He recommends Win2000 Pro if I can get a copy.

I am now totally confused and would appreciate any advice on which to put on the blasted laptop. It's going to be used for basic word processing, older games that won't work on XP and surfing.

Many thanks!

Katie

 

Win2K should be ok, touch more ram wouldnt go amiss. The other half has an old Dell Inspiron 4000 that I installed WinXP on, and although its slow to boot, its fine after that.

These have 600 MHz 128MB as standard, so should be ok for your machine.

 

I have an Inspiron 8000 at home (P3 750 I think with 192mb ram) and it runs Win XP Corporate edition fine.Nice n fast too (But I don't have it laden with additional software as we only really use the machine to surf the web via my wlan)
512mb ram is preferred to run XP but as I mentioned above,my laptop is fine with only 192mb

Good luck

 

Thanks! I have access to WinXP Home & Pro & Win98 so far, will see what else the other half can come up with!

The sticker on the base of the laptop says that it came with 2000 Pro originally so I do agree that that would be best.

Will be getting some more memory asap, it can hold 512 max, so I'll upgrade to that!

Katie

 

I ran XP home on my old laptop (P3 700Mhz with 256Mb memory) and it ran just fine. Used it for java and .net coding. Bit slow to compile, but otherwise it was fine....

 

My old desktop with 350 P2 & 384mb ram ran XP no bother - I reckon your lappy would cope ok.

 

It should be fine with W2K or XP (I've ran both on P3 600's albeit with at least 256Mb RAM.

The real killer is newer versions of MS Office. They'll cripple even the latest machines