Purchased used laptop, want to upgrade OS (1 Viewer)

[MattV]

I just purchased a used laptop (dell latitude 300mhz)and it came preloaded (without a disk) with win 98se. I use ME on my desktop and would like to put it on this laptop. The thing is that I only have the full version not the upgrade and I am afraid to format the laptop without any drivers or recovery disk. As you can tell I am totally new to laptops. I guess the question I am asking is how risky would it be to go ahead and install ME without the drivers? Anything I can do to decrease the risk?

Thanks,

Matt

 

[Jesse Leonard]

Even though you have the full version of Windows Me, you can still force it to just perform an upgrade install.

Boot into dos, change path to your CD rom. type: setup /NTLDR

This switch will force Windows to perform the upgrade.

 

[MattV]

Thanks a lot, I will try that right now.

Matt

 

[Vince Maskeeper]

Matt,

Once you get comfy with the laptop, I would highly recommend formatting and doing a fresh install- upgrades never seem to work very well for me- and a fresh install is oodles better.

All you need to do is go through and find all the hardware and note the info- and you can get replacement drivers online (99% of the time). Often, if it is a brandname laptop- the manufacturer will have a complete drive package, based upon model, on their website.

Again- sometimes it's been a pain to scare up obscure drivers for video built onto mobos for desktops- but I've never had problems finding all the replacement drivers for laptops.

-Vince

 

[Jesse Leonard]

Vince is correct in that it would be best to do a fresh clean install. Dell is normally pretty good about keeping all the drivers on their website updated. You can go to their site and look under the model of your laptop and check for drivers.

 

[MattV]

Okay, so I tried to use the full version to perform an upgrade but kept getting errors about having an existing version. I ended up taking Vince's advice and simply formatted the drive and started fresh. I decided that if I needed to download drivers I could do it from my desktop. However the laptop is up and running without a single missing piece of hardware or conflict and I didn't load a single driver. I am just lucky? When I have more time I will install all the newest drivers but everything seems to working great so far. Thanks for the advice!

Matt

 

[Ruben Zamora]

look around the laptop for a service tag. you can use that to go to dell's website and download all the updates you need for it.

 

[Jason Merrick]

This is not meant to come across as the usual rude flame, but I'm surprised no one has asked the obvious question:

Why in the world would you want to install ME instead of keeping 98? If anything, I would have done a fresh install of Win98 on your existing computer if you wanted them to be the same.

I don't think this is just a personal opinion either, the huge consensus seems to be that Windows ME is the least stable Windows Operating System ever.