how to upgrade thinkpad to useable windows machine

[gychang]

I have thinkpad 1141 series, with 300Mhz pentium, 4G HD, and 96MB of RAM.

Barely runs windows 2000, is there anything I can do to make it faster?. Win98 or XP home faster? Possible hardware upgrade?

thanks,

gychang

[Whyzman]

Hello gychang,

Welcome tohttp://www.pcguide.com/ubb/pcgubb.gif Forums!

Windows 2000 requires a "minimum" of 64 Meg of RAM...

I would suspect that any of today's memory intensive programs would almost immediately have you "swap filing" and that would noticeably slow things down...

My guess would be that your RAM is the bottleneck...

[Budfred]

Win98 would probably run faster, but still slow down and/or crash on some programs with that RAM. WinXP probably wouldn't work at all...

[Paul Komski]

Microsoft suggests the following minimum and recommended system configuration for a successful Windows 98 installation:

Required Hardware:

Processor:Minimum: 486/DX 66 Mhz Processor; Recommended: Pentium

RAM:Minimum:16 MB; Recommended: the more, the better performance you'll get

Monitor: Minimum:VGA 16 Colors; Recommended: SVGA 256 Colors

CD-ROM Drive: Minimum:1X; Recommended: 4X or faster

3.5" Floppy Diskette Drive

Hard Drive Space: 195 - 300 MB of available space dependant on installation options

Optional Additional Hardware:

Mouse: Minimum: Windows 98 compatible pointing device

Modem:Minimum: 14.4 BPS; Recommended: 28.8 BPS

[Fruss Tray Ted]

I have 98SE on my folks pc plus several others with slow processors and small amounts of RAM. I'm still trying to find the occassional crash or freeze it's supposed to do. The ones that happened on my pc were my fault not the OS.

Gychang,
1: What do you have running in the background?
2: What programs load up when you boot up your pc?

Granted, 98 will run faster but if you overload the running processes it will slow down to a crawl like ANY OS. 95 would scream along with that setup but IT is the one I have experienced errors, freezes and crashes with.

If you just load your A/V, firewall and systray, W2000 should work ok but I would go get more RAM for it anyway. Always double what MS says the minimum needed is. I always try to max my boards to their fullest, one that's 64 megs, others 128, 192...