Diagnosing a laptop problem

[PtBetsie]

I'm working with a donated Tecra 8100. Along with my plans to install WIN98SE temporarily, I am trying to determine if it has video problems and maybe I should just toss it. It only has 128mb RAM and when donated had WIN XP Pro installed. Would the lack of sufficient memory cause the video to disappear sporadically? I was trying to see what programs were installed and attempted to delete as many as I could. Most of the time this went fine but today the display just disappeared. It hadn't shut down as I could hear the drive. If the display problem is more than memory based, I don't want to spend more time and definitely not more money on it to get it to a useable state.:confused:

[johnny_quest]

128mb is not a "lack of sufficient memory" for xp. it's the minimum requirement and more than capable of running xp, though not very well.

And, I've never seen a display disappear due to how much ram you have... plug a monitor into the VGA output and see what happens...

does the display ever come back on?

[classicsoftware]

128mb is not a "lack of sufficient memory" for xp. it's the minimum requirement and more than capable of running xp, though not very well.

Maybe if you take about 100 Valium first. Then your mind will be as slow as the PC. There is no way XP will perform in any reasonable manner with 128MB of RAM. It will drive you to drinking, drugs, and psychiatric consultations. With 256 MB of RAM you will question you sanity. You need a MINIMUM of 512 MB of RAM to run XP unless all you want to do is boot to the desktop.

[PtBetsie]

A correction; it only has 64 mb of RAM, which just won't work. Even if I could find inexpensive modules, the manual for this says 256 Max of RAM. I need to get it working if that can be done with 98SE.

[classicsoftware]

What you need to do is use EBCD to make a boot CD. Boot to the CD and partition and format the drive. Get a copy of Windows 98 and place the contents of the CD on the drive and install from the drive. Please make sure you have downloaded all of the drivers first and place them on the hard drive as well.

[PtBetsie]

Is there a link to download the EBCD? I think the laptop has other problems so I don't think I;m going to donate much more time or money on it. The display disappears after 30 minutes so it has an overheating problem.

[Sylvander]

1. How to make a free “Smart Boot Manager” bootable floppy
http://www.pcguide.com/vb/showthread.php?t=41498
This makes it easier to boot a chosen drive [particularly the one holding the EBCD].

2. How to make a free EBCD bootable CD
http://www.pcguide.com/vb/showthread.php?t=41485
This has a large number of useful utilities too numerous to list, including "Image" [for DOS, by Terabyte] & "File Manager" and 32 DOS command progs.

Post #4 in the EBCD thread above shows how to use the "File Manager" on menu 1 [latest version of the "Volkov Commander" on menu 2] to copy the Windows installation file set to a partition other than C: [a good idea] and run the Windows install from there.
If installed in this way, in the future when Windows needs a file from those it will fetch it in a blink without asking that you provide the Windows installation CD in a drive with the same letter as during the original installation.

If the EBCD runs just fine with no display problems, you'd know there's no hardware problem apparent.
Or else you could load Knoppix from a Knoppix Linux Live CD (http://iso.linuxquestions.org/version.php?version=412) to see how the hardware performs.