Win 98 or 2K?

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I have resuscitated an old laptop. It has a PII /266mhz CPU, 160 megs of RAM and a 20-meg hard disk which has absolutely nothing on it, just one big FAT partition. I have installation media and could install Win98SE or Win2K Pro. I would like your recommendations about which would be preferable. Does this computer have enough horsepower to run Win2K Pro?

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Hi Bill,

Given your hardware, my personal preference here would be Win 98. It should run very nicely on this system. I’ve never used Win2K, but have heard there are some hardware and software support issues with that OS, so I imagine it is a question of what you want to do and how familiar you are with each different OS.

I did Google up some reading material for you on Win2K here, here and here.

HTH

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Hi Bill,

Given your hardware, my personal preference here would be Win 98. It should run very nicely on this system. I’ve never used Win2K, but have heard there are some hardware and software support issues with that OS, so I imagine it is a question of what you want to do and how familiar you are with each different OS.

I did Google up some reading material for you on Win2K here, here and here.

HTH

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Bill

Laptops are peculiar creatures, and the “NT”-type operating systems never did a good job of supporting them until XP came along. You haven’t really got the power or memory to run XP on your laptop, IMHO, so reluctantly I would also say to go with Windows 98 SE. But remember there’s no support (or very little), so any “Security Issues” that Windows 98 might have will not be addressed (except perhaps via IE updates)…

John

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I don’t know, I had very good luck with Windows 2000, but the laptop was bought and configured for it, and anything I certainly can’t vouch for anything less than the P III @ 800 Mhz @ 512MB RAM on which it ran.

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I don’t know, I had very good luck with Windows 2000, but the laptop was bought and configured for it, and anything I certainly can’t vouch for anything less than the P III @ 800 Mhz @ 512MB RAM on which it ran.

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Bill

Laptops are peculiar creatures, and the “NT”-type operating systems never did a good job of supporting them until XP came along. You haven’t really got the power or memory to run XP on your laptop, IMHO, so reluctantly I would also say to go with Windows 98 SE. But remember there’s no support (or very little), so any “Security Issues” that Windows 98 might have will not be addressed (except perhaps via IE updates)…

John

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Hopefully you mean a 20-gig hard drive rather than 20-meg. If so then Win2K should run OK provided you can find the correct drivers. I’ve run Win2K on a 300-MHz machine before.

If your 20-meg statement is correct then I think you’re probably stuck with DOS.

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Oops. Yes, that’s 20 gigabtyes.

My main concern is whether the PII/266 is adequate.

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Let’s just say it meets the requirements set by MS for that OS. But I think we all recall what they put forth as the minimum for all their other Operating Systems (Win95 on 8mb of RAM ring any bells). If you don’t want to do anything with the machine but run the OS then you should be fine running Win2K. Win98 should scream with that much RAM on a PII 266. Scream, of course, is a relative term. By today’s standards it will, as I stated before, run quite nicely.

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Let’s just say it meets the requirements set by MS for that OS. But I think we all recall what they put forth as the minimum for all their other Operating Systems (Win95 on 8mb of RAM ring any bells). If you don’t want to do anything with the machine but run the OS then you should be fine running Win2K. Win98 should scream with that much RAM on a PII 266. Scream, of course, is a relative term. By today’s standards it will, as I stated before, run quite nicely.

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Oops. Yes, that’s 20 gigabtyes.

My main concern is whether the PII/266 is adequate.

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Hopefully you mean a 20-gig hard drive rather than 20-meg. If so then Win2K should run OK provided you can find the correct drivers. I’ve run Win2K on a 300-MHz machine before.

If your 20-meg statement is correct then I think you’re probably stuck with DOS.

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