Thread: Win 98 or winXP on older laptop?

Originally Posted by Will Albers

Ladies, gents… I am VERY new to this CarPC idea, but I do have a few questions. I am planning on running my carpc off of an old Gateway Solo 9300 laptop and docking station. It is a P3 650 machine with 256 megs of memory and a 20 gig drive. It presently has win98SE on it. Do I want to try to upgrade the machine to XP or should I just leave it at win98? Which has a faster boot up time? Is there a user interface that is just so nice with XP that I have to dump 98? I have a free copy of win2k sitting around. Can i use that?

I plan on doing the following… Listening to Mp3’s, Watching DVDs, playing some basic emulated Nintendo games, possibly web browsing and e-mail. Maybe even navigation.

I’m unsure if I can find drivers for XP to cover everything needed. I did run the XP upgrade application to investigate issues and it discovered only one (USB Bus issue) which probably could be solved. I just wonder if I really need the XP footprint and with the limited memory of 256 megs of ram, will it eat up too much resource wise?

Thanks for your input!


WOW, look at that! a button....

Just did so. I am going to try winxp pro

Good for you!
I have a P3-650 laptop that runs Win2K Pro presently with no problems. I'm going to load XP Pro on it in the very near future, and I am certain there will be no issues, although I have less RAM than yor laptop.

i think that its a personal thing - you need to just play with both to see whats best.

You should also check out www.lite-pc.com and get rid of all the bloated "features" of either OS - do you need IE for mp3s?

I would keep it at win98, if you loaded xp, your boot time would be slower on that machine.
2000, in my opinion is no better than '98.
I think that pc would run the fastest with the existing win98
But...who am I?

Originally Posted by muldrick

I would keep it at win98, if you loaded xp, your boot time would be slower on that machine.

A slimline XP will boot faster, just take a little tweaking (cutting services and stuff)

Originally Posted by muldrick

2000, in my opinion is no better than '98.

Clearly I missed the punchline to that joke.

Originally Posted by muldrick

I think that pc would run the fastest with the existing win98

Thinking's not your strong suit is it?

Originally Posted by muldrick

But...who am I?

A Mac OS fan?

for real speed hit win 98 lite ( damn fast)
that pc will HAPPILY run xp ( my m8 had xp running on a pentium 233 MMX with like 98 meg of ram or something, or it mite have been a little more, but certainly wasnt upto 256 and it ran as sweet as a nut)

i found on my p3 450 that xp actually ran faster than 98

so my recomendation go with xp ( assuming u can get it cheap )else stick with 98 lite ( cheap to get and it uses ur 98 disk that u have)

which ever way do a re-install and find out what u can strip out from the origional install and DO IT
(98 lite will allow you to take out internet explorer and outlook express plus other stuff, so they are not taking up space that you could use for a more useful and more efficient browser or email software such as mozilla firefox or opera)
not sure how 98 lite copes with dvd stuff tho ( should be ok i suppose)

enjoy hope i was of help

I run a Celeron 500mhz PC with 256 RAM. I tried Win98 and decided on XP because of its plug and play capablilities, more stable (imo) and hibernation feature (which is all you should be using). Forget cold boot, hibernation is the way to go.

And 650 is plenty fast enough for xp.

Originally Posted by EBFoxbat

A Mac OS fan?

Hey, keep the bash on MAC talk in this thread: OS of choice?