Upgrade MOBO bios, drivers, or forget it?

[provobis]

I hate to throw anything away, although that's not the only reason for my questions here. I replaced my old computer which was fast becoming obsolete, with a Dell XPS400 and XP OS, but I would like to use the old computer which uses a Tekram P5M4-M+ MOBO for storage, copying, and/or as a slave companion to my Dell. But to do so it would seem desirable if not necessary to upgrade the MOBO as much as possible so that I can obtain the latest on-line info and other fixes, patches, etc. The old OS is 98SE which had no problems with the Tekram MOBO but experiments seem to prove that the Tekram MOBO does not like XP (actually XP MCE) and will not even recognize the OS CD no matter how I try to boot it, I'm guessing because of MOBO shortcomings such as bus speed, processor, etc. So, it appears necessary to use the 98SE OS with this computer. Am I right so far?

So I have considered a MOBO & driver flash bios which is found on the Tekram support website, although everything related to that MOBO model is obsolete, the only release date older than my original installed MOBO being one year later. Everything else available for flash has no release date so I assume those were the original MOBO builds used. If so, does it make sense to download and flash the MOBO with those driver utilities, as well as the bios flash which actually has a later release?

Or, does all this seem like a waste of time and effort?

How advisable is it to even think of using the old girl with the obsolete MOBO and 98SE?

Am I missing something when I failed to boot the XP OS CD to try to upgrade 98SE, even though the MOBO may not be up to full XP standards but still usable with XP?

Appreciate any views or ideas.

[ktkendall]

How much ram is in it and what processor is in there?

[provobis]

Originally Posted by ktkendall How much ram is in it and what processor is in there?

376 MB, AMD 2 K6 3D (400 mhz), and I tried installing a 80 gb HD with 98SE which evidently was successful.

[rjfvillarosa]

That should be OK to run XP, do you have an XP cd knocking about or can you borrow one? if so there is a compatiblity wizard in the GUI you can use to analyse that old machine to see what is stopping it from installing.
Not sure about XP MCE though.

[provobis]

Originally Posted by rjfvillarosa That should be OK to run XP, do you have an XP cd knocking about or can you borrow one? if so there is a compatiblity wizard in the GUI you can use to analyse that old machine to see what is stopping it from installing. Not sure about XP MCE though.

I have the (Dell) XP MCE 2005 CD of course, but that's what my CDROM won't read (error says drive not ready) even though it reads everything else. The 98SE boot floppy does not work for this purpose of course. For upgrades from 98 it should be possible to just boot on the CD from setup, but as I said no cigar. Maybe I'll have to format the drive again and then try to install XP? But back to line one again, because the MOBO may have to be changed and/or flashed to accomodate XP? I just don't know.

[provobis]

Whoops, I just realized something. My XP MCE OS CD is a DVD, and of course my Dell never had a problem with that since it has two DVD drives, but my old girl has only a CD ROM. Maybe I can burn a CD from the DVD for use on the old girl?

[Jimmy0]

CD only holds 700MB of information whereas on the DVD it will have a few GB's on info, so unless you can somehow split up the information and do it that way (don't even know if that's do-able), then you cannot make a CD from the DVD.

Can you pull a DVD-ROM out from another computer to use just to sort out Windows?

[provobis]

Originally Posted by Jimmy0 CD only holds 700MB of information whereas on the DVD it will have a few GB's on info, so unless you can somehow split up the information and do it that way (don't even know if that's do-able), then you cannot make a CD from the DVD. Can you pull a DVD-ROM out from another computer to use just to sort out Windows?

No, don't have anything else to use. Looks like I'll have to be happy using 98...just thought it would be nice to have XP on the older computer also, even though it won't have all my Dell speed.

[provobis]

Still wondering if it's advisable to flash the bios/drivers for use with 98SE, since it'seems XP is out. My only reason would be to keep updated on line with the older computer, as I would be using virus, malware, software updates, etc.

Remember that the MOBO bios is the only flash file that has a Tekram release date about year after my original computer purchase...all other (drivers) have no archives or release dates so I assume they were the same a I had originally on the MOBO. Or would it just be good general practice, or just leave the MOBO as is?

[glc]

You can't use your Dell XP on that anyway - that is a violation of the license agreement. If you want to run XP you have to buy another copy.

With those specs, Windows 2000 should run quite nicely. However, that costs more than XP Home.

If it's running well with 98SE, just leave it alone and network it, it will do a good job as a storage server. I would not sweat keeping it updated as long as you are behind a router and keep an updated antivirus on it.