How much disk space for Windows?

[NBee]

Hi.

I have an old Dell laptop with a 2Gb drive. It currently has Win98 ME installed, but I'd like to upgrade to 2000 to try and overcome some problems. I'm in the process of upgrading to 256Mb memory.

Bearing in mind that I won't be installing anything other than Office, is this feasible? How much disk space does 2000 take up?

Thanks.

[edge345]

With win2000 and a full install office it is only about 450 megs with all updates. I would put on win xp for a more trouble free system providing the dell is a 350+, add another 100 megs for winxp. 256 ram will be great with ethier operating system.


edge3454

[reboot]

WHAT? You want to put XP on a 2 gig drive, and then load Office?
Don't be ridiculous. An XP install will take up almost that much room, and use the rest for a page file. Adding office will make it crawl, even if you could get it installed.
A basic XP install will take up about 1.5gig, unless you pare it down to almost nothing (deselect everything on install).
Putting Win2k on there is even a risky proposition, and ME is also touchy because of it's restore function.
I would run 98 on it, and only run SE if you need ICS.

[NBee]

Thanks for the advice guys - there seems to be some difference of opinions on the size of XP.

I'd be surprised if 2000+office is only 450Megs - the current ME+office installation is 1.5Gb....which doesn't leave a lot...

I only have installations for 2000 and XP, so I'd like to try one of them. I guess I'll try 2000 first and see if that solves my problems.

[edge345]

sorry for the miss information NBee my mind was somewhere else.
a full install of office is a little over 500megs. and you winxp alone is 1.5 gigs....

Thanks reboot for correcting me....

[doctorgonzo]

Why try to shoehorn everything onto such a small drive? Just buy a bigger drive. A gigabyte of storage is so cheap it is silly not to.

[NBee]

for a laptop that my friend uses for nothing other than Office? Not sure it's that cheap, and I have NO idea how to change a drive in a laptop...

[Tuf]

Most Dell notebooks have one screw that holds the hard drive in. They are very easy to change. You can buy a decent notebook drive for a hundred dollars. I don't like the idea of buying used hard drives but you can buy used 6GB 2.5" drives for twenty to thity dollars.
If you want to run 2000 and even the standard version of Office you will need more than 2GB of space.

[NBee]

The Model is a Dell Latitude, if that means anything to you.

I'll certainly have a look for some cheap drives. Thanks for the advice. But barring that, I'll still have to try 2000 and see how it performs.

[Tuf]

The Latitudes are DELL's business line. Most of them are good computers. With a 2GB drive you might want to see what processor it uses, but if it runs Me ok it will probably be ok with 2000.

Drivers will be the biggest issue you'll have to overcome. If 2000 was ever supported by DELL on te particular model you are working with then you'll be able to get them from their support site. If 2000 was not supported by them you may not be able to use it.

[NBee]

Well, I've been looking around this forum and reading about how most people seem to prefer 98SE over ME. It sounds like it's smaller and more bug free, so I'm thinking of doing a fresh install with Win98SE instead.

The processor is Pentium 233 by the way.

[Tuf]

A 233 will run Me or 98SE just fine. Personally on my own computers I had less trouble with Me than with 98. But overall I think most people's problems with Me are driver related. Me sometimes requires different drivers than 98 and for some hardware they just aren't available.