Thinkpads Forum

I have an i series 1400 with a 4 gb harddrive. It came with windows 98, which I lost all recovery cd's for. I got a virus on the 98, cleaned it, but the system never worked the same. The hard drive was partitioned, so it kept saying c was full. Out of frustration, I let my brother in law work on it. He said he couldn't reformatt it, I don't know why. He also said 98 wouldn't work because when it loaded it gave a general protection fault error, blue screen, or msgrv32 error and promptly shut down. Instead, he decided to load Windows XP Pro, not a purchased copy, which I didn't know at the time. My problem now is that I can't activate the xp, because it's not legal. I would be glad to buy a new version of windows and install it, but I'm not sure that would work. At present I can only boot up into the XP safe mode, can't do anything with 98 , and wan't to clean the entire HD and start over. Is this possible? If so, is this HD upgradable to a larger one? Do I spend the money on Windows or just bury the laptop?

If you don't want to spend the money on windows.......There is always linux.


-Toe

If I can get the hd back to 98 will Linux load on it? I don't mind spending money on it, just as long as it's not foolish to do so because the system is so old. If I started with a wiped clean hd would Linux work better that way, or windows?

You'll probably want to repartition the drive if youa re having partition trouble. That can be done with FDISK which is on the 98 boot disk.

Windows 98 or ME will probalby run fine and dandy on your system but if you want a current OS and don't acutally NNED Windows per say, then Linux would be a good choice. You could probably find out more about Linux from other board memebers because there are so many different versions of Linux. My personal preference is RedHat but I'm unsure of how fast the latest version of that would run on your computer.

I have the same laptop, I am trying to save it running windows2000 by upgrading the memory (manual states 256RAM but may work with more) and upgraded HD already...

gychang

bogo22 wrote: I have an i series 1400 with a 4 gb harddrive. It came with windows 98, which I lost all recovery cd's for. I got a virus on the 98, cleaned it, but ?

I am using an Ebay i series 1400 (2621-420) with a larger hard drive
20 gig as an MP3 jukebox.

The older IBM's are fairly solid with lots of docs and a
fair amount of parts available.

Using it as a dedicated player with Win XP works better than
the fragile MP3 players available at about 1/3 the cost.

For what its worth...

Max F.

Yeah, if anything, these old compys are good as fancy cheap jukeboxes since pretty much anything made after a 486 can play MP3's. These old laptops are also pretty handy to keep around if you have a wireless network and Windows XP on your desktop as you can use your old laptop as a remote desktop terminal.

A few more good uses for these older ThinkPads can include business tasks, backing up files and documents and you can also use these things for other various tasks like a print server or something in those lines.

I have a 390,celeron 366,256 ram,4.8gig drive.I'm running XP Pro on it no problem.Run's nice.Not to slow,good for an older 366mhz.

Is it worth rescuing? Nah! send it to me

I have installed Win98 and 98SE on many computers and ***most*** of them gave me that stupid protection error at the end of the installation process. You can bypass that by restarting the computer and choose the "step-by-step confirmation" mode. By skipping one or two startup steps (unfortunately I forget which ones), you can finish the installation and the computer will work fine.

If your computer has USB ports, make sure you install Win98SE instead of 98.

bogo22 wrote: IHe also said 98 wouldn't work because when it loaded it gave a general protection fault error, blue screen, or msgrv32 error and promptly shut down.

SaberX wrote:I have a 390,celeron 366,256 ram,4.8gig drive.I'm running XP Pro on it no problem.Run's nice.Not to slow,good for an older 366mhz.

My TP240 has an even slower CPU (300 Celeron), 320 RAM, and 40GB drive, and it too runs Win XP Pro quite well, though it's obviously slower than my TP600E which has 366 PII and 416MB RAM.