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One for the more techno savvy bods:

Say you got a cheeeap old laptop off ebay
And it was running Win NT 4.0 Workstation
Would it be better to keep that, or zap it all and put 95 / 98 on it?

It's all ready installed, and has full Office 97 and a few other potentially useful progs on there... but it does seem a bit sluggish in various things e.g. MS Word loading/operation, there's no sound or hibernation drivers (or defragger!) and I'm completely baffled how to install them, and I'm not sure on it's compatibility with other programs or hardware i'd want to install, other than that Norton Utilities is RIGHT out.

Hints, tips, opinions? Cheers

(specs: P133, 32mb in 144pin SoDimm, 1.3gb disc of reasonable speed, all of which can probably be easily upgraded, i'm thinking 166MMX u/c to 100mhz, 64mb and 2gb solid-state before too long... unbelievably it's Lithium Ion battery still seems good for about 2 hours! PS When i say things are sluggish, i'm meaning noticably slower than the p60/16mb 72pin/slooow 810mb this is an upgrade from.. jeez!)

I would go to '98 if possible, just for ease of use.

i would start from scratch...format it and installed your own preference

This way it may speed it up a lil as its a brand new install...just make sure you keep your window patches/antivirus up to date and that you run disk deframenter/disk cleanup on a regular basis to optimise it to its best

Rich

Make sure you have all the correct drivers your going too need first. old laptop can be abit funny in my experience. Then 98 will be fine, get 98SE (second edition) if you can find a copy. When you install it do a custom install and tell it not to install any bits your not going to use (networking/Games/themes for example) This will help with hard disk space and may help with the speed thing.

cheers for the info.... good to see no-ones bigging up the old business system and im not crazy after all (in that sense anyway)

NT's effed me right off now, none of the changed settings will stick (dont know if there's some write-protection i have to unclick somewhere?) and the official sound drivers were at first rubbish, then broke down entirely and would neither uninstall nor reinstall. arrrgh.

it did at least allow me to install nero and a network card so i could plonk a hard disc image and a file mode backup onto my desktop pc

going to try for a lite version of win95 osr2.1 first - copying the CAB files over to HD and tweaking one of the initial setup files so that it never even begins to install internet explorer this is what i did on the other one and it works like a charm, should bomb along on the quicker machine.