PC Hardware

chuck · Guest

I recently acquired a Dell Inspiron 700m laptop
with Win XP Pro, which is fat and slow. I'd love
to install 98 SE instead. Where might I find appropriate
drivers for the touch pad, modem, NIC, and Intel chipset?

Darwin · Guest

Hi Chuck,

I am *guessing* that you are going to have difficulty finding drivers for this very new laptop. However, here are two different, but parallel, thoughts for you...

First, you can turn off many of the services and "eye-candy" that hog resources in WinXP. An excellent website that tells you how to do this may be found here (this is the route that I took, and I was very much of the same opinion as you when I purchased my notebook):

http://www.monroeworld.com/pchelp/tweakxp.php

The other thought, or suggestion, is that if you do feel strongly that you need to change O/S altogether, you consider Win2k rather than 98SE. WinXP Pro has only recently "proven" itself to me - I've been a die-hard fan of Win2k since I installed it on my other notebook that had been running Win98SE. There really is no comparison between 98SE and 2k. Running on the same hardware, you'll notice a significant increase in speed and stability running 2k vs. 98SE. It's also considerably more stable. It is more stable than XP, too, in my opinion.

Note that the effect of the first thought that I gave you above is to convert an XP installation into something that looks almost indistinguishable from 2k but that has many newer security features and much more support for 3rd party software and hardware.

Just my two-bits worth. I'd personally give the tweaks at monroeworld a go before I'd try installing another windows O/S.

Hope this helps,

Mike

I recently acquired a Dell Inspiron 700m laptop
with Win XP Pro, which is fat and slow. I'd love
to install 98 SE instead. Where might I find appropriate
drivers for the touch pad, modem, NIC, and Intel chipset?

[comp.sys.laptops]

Angry American · Guest

Windows 98 does not support your machine, I would think it would be
impossible to find drivers that will support your processor stepping, power
management, etc. Even Windows 2000 does not fully support all of these
options.

Dan

chuck wrote:

BigJIm · Guest

I have a different model dell but mine was slow until I uninstalled Norton
and used a different anti-virus program. I also upgraded to 512 megs of ram
from 256.
runs fine now.
"chuck" <ccREMOVEiaffone@earthlinDELETEk.net> wrote in message
news:SBQDd.998$KJ2.896@newsread3.news.atl.earthlink.net...

Barry Watzman · Guest

XP is a FAR better OS than 98SE. You can make it look so much like 98SE
that you won't be able to tell that it's not without going into Control
Panel. The customization options exist, but they are scattered and
burried (and some of them require using "TweakUI", a free download from
Microsoft).

However, I also do use 98SE a lot and I do still install most of my
systems (including my laptops) "dual boot" with both 98SE and XP.

Getting 98SE running on a "newer" laptop is hit or miss. Necessary
drivers simply may not exist, and even if they do exist, they may be
very difficult to find. I've done this a few times, and you can expect
to spend about a full week (40 hours or so), searching for and trying
drivers (by the way, this is best done with a test, scrap hard drive,
you only need a gigabyte or two for testing).

Once you succeed -- if you do -- if you want dual boot, 98SE must be
installed first, then XP. That means a total clean install of XP, quite
possibly NOT from the "recovery disc", which may wipe out everything
(partitions and all), and thus not be useable for installing XP as a 2nd
OS in a dual boot environment.

I have no knowledge of your machine, but for starters you need to
identify the chips used to implement all of the functionality of the
laptop. Generally, you don't need drivers for the touchpad, but you
will need drivers for the modem, nic, video, sound, motherboard chipset
..... at least, and perhaps quite a bit more.

Best of luck.

chuck wrote:

Dan · Guest

The reason your 700m is slow is because of all the garbage dell installs. Xp
pro is a very good operating system and usually runs quite quickly. The only
way to get rid of all that crap is to re-install xp. You cannot use the
recovery cd's since it will re-install all the crap dell put on there.

"chuck" <ccREMOVEiaffone@earthlinDELETEk.net> wrote in message
news:SBQDd.998$KJ2.896@newsread3.news.atl.earthlink.net...

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