My mate has just arrived in Siam with his 1999 Compaq Presario and an Ipod Mini. He has a USB cable and Win 98, more PC details than that I don't know.

To play his iPod on his laptop is the idea. He hasn't been able to do this so far.

I've connected his iPod to my PC running XP at work, and it is recognised and doesn't need to be reformatted - a good thing as he has about 1,000 tunes on it!

I'm downloading various drivers for his Win 98 laptop, as I don't know which edition he has, so hopefully one of them should work. I have seen, however, recomendations that folks like him should upgrade to Win 2000. His harddrive is only 4 GB, so XP's out of the question, as I'm guessing his CPU is a wee bit slow by today's standards. I see that Win 2000 uses less resources than XP.

What do you guys think? Should he stick with Win 98 and try and get by on that, or try the upgrade to Win 2000, which seems to be much more compatible with the iPod. All he's going to use his laptop for is the iPod, and maybe watching VCDs (CD-ROM player only).

Any ideas? Cheers...

My mate has just arrived in Siam with his 1999 Compaq Presario and an Ipod Mini. He has a USB cable and Win 98, more PC details than that I don't know.

To play his iPod on his laptop is the idea. He hasn't been able to do this so far.

I've connected his iPod to my PC running XP at work, and it is recognised and doesn't need to be reformatted - a good thing as he has about 1,000 tunes on it!

I'm downloading various drivers for his Win 98 laptop, as I don't know which edition he has, so hopefully one of them should work. I have seen, however, recomendations that folks like him should upgrade to Win 2000. His harddrive is only 4 GB, so XP's out of the question, as I'm guessing his CPU is a wee bit slow by today's standards. I see that Win 2000 uses less resources than XP.

What do you guys think? Should he stick with Win 98 and try and get by on that, or try the upgrade to Win 2000, which seems to be much more compatible with the iPod. All he's going to use his laptop for is the iPod, and maybe watching VCDs (CD-ROM player only).

Any ideas? Cheers...

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

Ive put 2000 on laptops of this size before without too many problems(sometimes they dont like it).Ramp up the ram if you can & if you put other programs like office in then chop them down to what is actually needed.

Yep,

upgrade to win2000 would be recommended.

I've got it running on a pII266 laptop with 192mb memory and this works just fine.

Win2000 doesn't use that many more resources then 98, just try and get the memory as high as possible.

Secondhand 128mb modules of that era can be found for 1500 Baht in most shops stocking second hand laptops!

Two major disadvantages of win98 are the poor usb/external drives support, and the lacking of support of ntfs formatted drives. Both are important with using external devices!

Then you can go hunting for older versions of popular software, such as office98 or 2000, acdsee 5.0 and practical stuff like that. These will run much faster then the latest versions!

I had a (2000, 2001?) lap-top running W98 and upgraded to XP without any problems. It would've been happier with more memory (it only had 256K) but it wasn't worth the cost to upgrade it - bought a new one instead.

My mate has just arrived in Siam with his 1999 Compaq Presario and an Ipod Mini. He has a USB cable and Win 98, more PC details than that I don't know.

To play his iPod on his laptop is the idea. He hasn't been able to do this so far.

I've connected his iPod to my PC running XP at work, and it is recognised and doesn't need to be reformatted - a good thing as he has about 1,000 tunes on it!

I'm downloading various drivers for his Win 98 laptop, as I don't know which edition he has, so hopefully one of them should work. I have seen, however, recomendations that folks like him should upgrade to Win 2000. His harddrive is only 4 GB, so XP's out of the question, as I'm guessing his CPU is a wee bit slow by today's standards. I see that Win 2000 uses less resources than XP.

What do you guys think? Should he stick with Win 98 and try and get by on that, or try the upgrade to Win 2000, which seems to be much more compatible with the iPod. All he's going to use his laptop for is the iPod, and maybe watching VCDs (CD-ROM player only).

Any ideas? Cheers...

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

Yes, upgrade. No problem on install on 4gb. Also agree on RAM as others have said. If you intend to keep computer, upgrade disk is easy and cheap. 20, 30, 40 gb disks are usually easy to install, and you can also take them out and salvage them to use on another PC when the time comes to get rid of it (if you are into using used equipment). I keep an old laptop like that around for travelling. If someone steals it, I won't cry too much. Probelm with old laptops over time are the batteries (if you use it without plugging in), you have a hard time finding batteries that work and buying new ones (if you can find them) costs ###### near as the value of the old piece of sh*t.

Many thanks for your advice, guys!

I shall endeavour to advise him on the upgrade course. He's off to Bangkok shortly so should be able to pick up all he needs in Pantip Plaza, eh.