Thinkpads Forum

I have an old 380Z that still runs great. It is a Pentium II, 300MHz with 160MB of RAM and a 20GB HDD. I don't have any of the original disks and have been having problems recently with trying to install PCI ethernet cards because it seems it can't find drivers. I've been thinking of upgrading to Windows XP because that still has ongoing support from Microsoft. Does anyone have any advice? I'm a little afraid of going for the install and having it not work because without the original disks I won't be able to restore the system if it all goes horribly wrong...

I don't know that's kinda iffy. As much as I hate to say it I have ME on mine but I just use it as a terminal to log into my server so for all intents and purposes it's server 2003

quinncx wrote:trying to install PCI ethernet cards

From that statement I gather that you plan on going online with that 380Z. Then, it's important to upgrade to XP with SP3 and all security updates because Windows 98SE is not secure enough. Unfortunately, you can't increase the RAM any further. I recommend you to look into a freeware called nlite, which allows you to install a minimal version of XP. And getting a faster hard drive should help a bit as well.

If you don't want to go this route, I suppose the second best option would be Windows 2000 with the latest updates, plus a good firewall, plus a good virus scanner (just like you would do for XP), and activate all security features for the internet browser. Whether you use 2000 or XP, you should access the internet from a limited account rather than one with administrative privileges.

If there's any doubt about not being able to revert back to your original hard drive settings, then do NOT attempt to upgrade your OS using that hard drive. Get another drive to play around with for your OS experiments. The other route would normally be to image your existing drive onto CDs. You then still have the problem of not knowing if the image was taken properly and whether or not you can successfully restore that image onto a drive; again you would need to use a second HD if you wish to safeguard your existing disk.

Windows XP's recommended system requirements are 300Mhz and 128MB of RAM. I'm of the opinion that you need to double those figures before you get a usable XP experience. A fully loaded 600X (500Mhz and 576MB of RAM) with XP is functional but kind of slow. Being limited to 160MB of memory would mean that you probably can't run Firefox .

+1 for the recommendation to try Windows 2000. It's "modern" enough to run most of today's software and have the drivers that you need. However, End-of-Support from Microsoft is July of this year. SP4 was the last update.