i have an old P1 toshiba laptop running windows 98 (not 98se). it has 32mb of ram,and is supposed to be able to take a 128mb stick,(for a total of 160mb) but it will not recognize any ram i put in it. also, which would be a better OS, windows 98 or windows server NT 4.0. i do not work much w/ pcs this old, and i am very unfamiliar w/ the OS.
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Depending on the model, most older laptops used proprietary or non standard RAM. Plus it might only recognize 128mb total, so 2x64, or the 1 128mb stick.
As for the OS, NT is great for stability, but 95/98/98SE/ME are better for games, if you want to put older ones on it.
If the machine is 233mhz or faster, I highly recommend windows 2000. It is one of my favorite OS versions. Plus it is somewhat recent.
Your third option is to put some flavor of linux on it, but you might have problems with hardware and whatnot, and it might not be the easiest to install.
I've owned a couple Pentium/Pentium MMX laptops over the years. Depending on its vintage it'll need either 70ns Dynamic RAM (not SD-RAM) or 60ns EDO. To be frank, finding it at a reasonable price will be almost impossible. You can try Googling system's exact model number and see if you turn up anything, but chances are anyone selling "new-old stock" RAM will want an arm and a leg for it.
If you end up being stuck with 32MB of RAM your list of reasonable OS choices is pretty short. Windows 95 or 98 will "work", but you're not going to be able to run any modern applications and the thing will be oozing with security holes. It'd be a decent choice if you just want to use the laptop to play old games and little else. NT 4.0 sucks with that little RAM, is also a lost cause when it comes to security, and is *really hard* to install on laptops. There are Linux and Net/FreeBSD versions that will work on such a small machine, but you'll be looking at "specialty" tiny distributions, not mainstream Ubuntu/Fedora/et al.
Here's an Ubuntu forum post rounding up some possible suspects. Beware, however, that the sorting order for this list is how much disk/image space the various choices take up, not how much RAM they want. Quite a few of the Linuxes listed are designed to boot from CDs or flash devices and run in RAM, which obviously makes them poor choices for a 32MB machine.
I might be tempted to run the FreeDOS+OpenGEM combo if I had a weak machine like that sitting around, but that's mainly because I have fond memories of some GEM software (I did a lot of work in Timeworks "Publish It!" back in the day) and Wordperfect 5.1. ;^b
... so i think i will just leave 98 on it. i already installed word 2000
I have an old Toshiba laptop. 486, 48Mb RAM, 1.2Gb hard drive, and USB!
The Toshiba was running Windows 98 SE with all the updates. I would recommend Windows 98 SE over any of the other Windows of that era.
The Toshiba now runs Knoppix Linux using the command line instead of X. Linux boots off of a CD-ROM, and finds all of the hardware including a lot of obscure pieces that I might plug into the USB (1.0) port.
Bizarre. The inclusion of USB implies that the laptop has PCI architecture (which does not equate to a PCI slot) which is unusual for 486s. I would have thought that the increased cost of the chipset would have justified a Pentium processor. Perhaps is was designed that way for thermal reasons? Model number?
Toshiba Satellite Pro 440CDX
CPU: Pentium MMX - 133 MHz
If you can get the RAM situation figured out, take it to Windows 2000. Office 2003 will run on there (and with the 2003 compatibility pack) you can have Office 2007 compatibility.
It will also play most older games (Sim City 2000, Doom, etc. just fine)