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.
You can do direct cable transfers in DOS...requires a bootdisk set up for it. Or, you can make a partition on the drive to hold the CABs while you have a good OS (as Ryan indicates he will) and transfer them over before wiping C:
#12. "RE: laptop bidding" In response to Al (Reply # 10) Fri Dec-14-01 07:53 AM
>You can do direct cable transfers in DOS...requires a >bootdisk set up for it.
Ok, thanks Al (Delar too), I had no idea you could do a direct cable transfer through dos. I don't know if that'll help ryan, but it certainly does me.
I've got an older 486 compaq laptop with 16 mb ram, no room for a cd drive. I installed win 95 on it with an LS120 superdrive (parallel).I copied the win95 installation files onto the superfloppy and used the dos drivers to get it setup. Because it has a small harddrive I don't store the .cab files on the drive. Win95 doesn't run half bad on it.Gets by on the internet too.I was kind of surprised, expecting it to much slower than it is . Good enough for away from home. Then I decided to DCC it to my other pc's. That works fine between win98 and win95.
Thanks everyone for the tips. I never thought of it at all but I do happen to have a program to transfer files by serial connection in dos. It does not look like we will win it since it's already at 90$ I think but a technician saied that it's still a good deal at 100$ since it would cost about 200-300$ to upgrade it good. But what the specs are now is still good enough for homework and stuff. It was a docking station too so I'd be able to transfer files with my desktop. I'm not sure what the brand is though. I din't see it yet.