My girlfriend wants me to install xp onto her computer. She has windows 98. Her sister bought xp and installed it on her computer. 2 questions 1)Can they share the disk and put it on two computers? 2)Is there an easy step by step on how install windows xp?
1.)not legally (with XP annoying activation scheme, one disk, one system (unless you want to pay for extra licensees) 2.)it's very easy to install XP, I'm sure there are many guides floating around on how to do it. However what are the specs of your girlfriends laptop. If it was running 98, the laptop might not be powerful enough (to old) to run XP (efficiently).
There are ways illegally to install it on 2 machines. First XP's minimum requirements are: 333mhx pentium 3 or better ( i say 700 mhz) 256 meg of ram ( i say 512 ) 3 or 4 gig of space on the HD. I am not a big fan of upgrades b/c you carry over possible virus, spyware , junk, bad drivers to the new install. I much prefer to do a wipe of the hd, then install xp. just buy another copy of xp and be done with it.
you wipe out the hard drive during the install procedure (there is an option). When you load the XP installation programme, it will ask you where you want to install it. Click the existing partition (C:\ most cases) and it will give you the option to format in FAT32 or NTFS (use NTFS, much better) http://www.softpedia.com/get/Others/E-Book/Windows-XP-Setup-Simulator.shtml before you go with the install, give the programme in the above link a try. It simulates a Windows XP install. (goes through the processes of a normal windows installation).
So at a guess this laptop dates from around 99-2000.. It must or it would be running me-home. It's going to be a dog with xp. Try 2000 first and see if it still seems fast, and there aren't any driver issues. I have installed xp on lots and lots of old machines. Anything running 98 (think less than a 600MHz cpu) NEEDS 512 ram or else you spend weeks and weeks waiting for applications to load.. 380 will do if you are patient, but 256 just seems to lock up all the time as every application writes to the page file. What processor does this antique have? If it's running a cyrix m2 (very likely.. the low power version) you need to forget xp.. No L2 cache means no xp. I haven't even started on driver problems. I have a feeling trying to install xp (which isn't great anyway) will be a real headache with drivers.. watch for a system partition.. a lot of these older machines have one, and wiping it = bricked. current test machine.. Dell dimension p3 560MHz with 256ram.. originally built for 98 with only 64 ram.. xp is slow and unstable, even with the Aston desktop. Normal system ram usage is around 220Mb (190 just sitting there doing nothing) and with any applications running quickly rises above 300MB with constant page file writing and slowdown. Just because you can install xp doesn't mean, for performance reasons, that you should.
