TechSpot - PC Technology News and Analysis

hey, i was wondering if you can put windows XP on a laptop computer which was designed for windowns 98 without seriously screwing anything up. bye the way, the lap top is a dell Inspiron 5000e. pretty old. thx ^_^

If your computer is:

CPU 233Mhz
Ram 64Mb
Hdd: 1.5Gb

Then you meet the mimimum requirements. But personally, if my system was in that ballpark, I wouldn't recommend going to XP. My guess is that your system would actually run faster on '98 if it is this old.

The only other consideration is whether or not you have any REALLY old hardware that is not compatible with XP. Not likely, but a possibility. If you are unsure, do a google with your hardware part number and "xp compatible" to see what comes up.

Good luck!

I put XP on an older Dell Inspiron 450 mhz laptop and it ran fine. but before attempting to do so I would suggest runnning the comapitability wizard found on the XP CD.

im only doing it to get newer, better, driverz, such as drivers for a removable hard-drive

It kind of depends on exactly what you have. My wife has a Dell laptop that only has a 233Mhz intel processor and 128 MB ram. I upgraded it to XP and everything runs, but runs slowly. If you don't have at least 256 MB ram I wouldn't mess with it. I know it's a pain to find drivers for 98 (I had to find a driver for my mom's 98 laptop because it couldn't read her USB flash drive), but it's more of a hassle waiting forever to run anything. Besides, most programs that require XP won't run on an older computer anyway.