Installing OS on my new laptop? could do with some help guys :)

[rockhard]

Ive got a Toshiba 4310 satellite pro coming tomorrow but it has win98 on it.
I want to put either WinME or Win2K prof on it - which would be best for speed with 192mb ram?

Ive never done a lappy before so was wondering what software am i goin to have to install?
Ive downloaded all the latest drivers for both win9x and 2k and also got the latest bios too.
Will i just need the basics like display, sound, mouse stick or will i need all the other stuff - theres 10 different sets of drivers/apps for each OS! ??? :/

Ive found some new drivers for the S3 MX/IX graphics card on S3's site - is it safe to use these instead of Toshiba's? It says on the site that the drivers have to be specially adapted by the manufacturer of the notebook before they will work properly?

grrr, gotta get some sleep (just got in from work).

If u guys can point me in the right direction id appreciate it,

rockhard =)

 

[kombatmud]

I personally would go with win2k pro with the toshiba display drivers. The reasoning behind this is that win2k pro is significantly more stable than winME, and the performance difference is negligable (I'm not sure which if either would be faster), both would run fine on 192MB ram. I would recommend you make sure you have a boot disk that can boot the laptop with CD access, and create a CD with all the drivers toshiba has on their site before doing anything. (If possible, otherwise copy them all on to the hard drive, and hope you don't have to format it, or use a big stack of disks). You probably will not need all the drivers, since win 2k will probably pick up most of it, but laptops can be picky, and I've had some where I needed nearly everything available to download. As for software, you'd need the same software you would put on a desktop, and if toshiba has any special configuration utility, you'd want that too, otherwise the rest of the stuff they ship it with is mostly junk, that'll unneccessarily consume resources. I would choose the toshiba display driver over S3 because you know it'll work, and you won't get any significant performance from the S3 drivers, since 3D is not an issue on laptops (yet), and 2D performance does not change that drasitically with driver updates IMO.

 

[Czar]

Win2000 has way more support for laptops, as in power control and everything.