My mom is bidding on a laptop that is a Pentium 133MHz, 40MB of ram, 2 GIG hard drive and windows 95. It's not the best but I guess it's all I need for school if I want to use it for that. The problem is that it does not have a cd-rom drive. How the heck do I install an Os if ever it crashes??? And is it easy/cheap to buy one and put it in? I never openned or seen inside a laptop before. I already have enough with full size PC's
"I never openned or seen inside a laptop before" Knowing Ryan through his posts, does anyone want to bet on how long it will take him to crack that baby open? My guess is 2 days or less after he gets it.
well ryan this wont help you much, but i took my pentium 166 laptop w/almost identical specs to the local pc store and they intalled the os for me for $30. I believe they used an infrared port to accomplish the feat, but I don't know for sure!
It might be designed to use a CDROM drive that plugs into a port on it, which could be expensive to buy. What make of laptop is it? Given the processor speed, that machine is at least 5 years old.
>Copy the cd on another puter's HD then copy peer to peer to >the laptop HD. Install from the HD.
for my own curiousity, how do you do that bob? with a direct connection cable or what? does the other computers explorer automatically detect the laptops hd?
That wont work however in Ryans case or mine. What he has is a laptop with no cd-rom. If a laptop has no cd-rom and no OS system installed on it, then that method of direct cable connection would not work would it? How do you get the OS files onto the HD initially?
One way, of course, is to buy the appropriate external CD drive, either parallal port or pcmcia, if the machine has a card slot. You want to make sure the drive you get has MS-DOS based drivers, because to start the install, you will need to boot up in DOS mode.
Get, make, buy, a serial or parallal port "null cable" known commonly as "Laplink, Pcanywhere, Direct Connect" cable. Find the good old "ll3.exe" (laplink 3 for dos). You can copy the files from the Cd in one machine (your desktop) to the hd of the laptop.
You can also get an adaptor that will enable you to install the laptop hard drive in a desktop machine. Again, you can copy the install files to the hd.
I've done both the laplink and external cd thing with a couple of old IBM thinkpads.