Windows 2000 down to 98

Hi

I've got a new laptop from work, and have kept the olde one, a six year old Dell Latitude. Not a great spec, but I fancied a spare lappie for home to do some wp and some retro-gaming on.

It originally had Windoze 98 2nd ed on it, accordig to the license sticker on the bottom of the laptop. It's got Windoze 2000 on it now, and as it takes a while to boot up, and has work-related networking and antivirus stuff on it, I reckoned on starting from scratch with it. I tried loading XP on it, but the disk I've got for XP is an upgrade disk, and it didn't accept 2000 as a valid package which it could upgrade (checked on the web and found this was the case).

So I'm d/l a Windows 98 second ed, and planned to use the licence key on the lappie to install that.

I'm after any tips on the process, and one particularly query: the laptop has an external cd drive with a dell proprietary connector for the cd, and I'm wondering if in the process of installing 98, I'm going to lose the drivers and the connectivy to the cd?

M

 

For the drivers problem it would be a good idea to use one of those driver utilities that offers to save a backup of the drivers it finds. Saving the backup to cd might not work though if the external cd needs drivers to be recognized. Maybe just the cd drivers on floppy if it has one and the rest on cd.

You don't have to install 98se to install an XP upgrade over it, all you have to do is format the hard drive and during the XP fresh install it will ask for the 98se cd (oops there's that cd again) and ask you to type in the serial. I have installed an upgrade vesion of XP this way several times.

It seems all this revolves around whether or not that cd is recognized from scratch or needs drivers, even a backup of the original OS would have to be put onto disks. Do you have a spare laptop hard drive you could put in there to experiment with before you mess around with the original?

 

:confused You're downloading Windows 98??? From the internet??? Hmmmm.... beware of viruses and malware. Not only is it illegal to download Windows from the internet, but it seems to me that it is ripe for a malware meltdown.