Which OS is right for this laptop..

[JutTG]

Dell Inspiron 7000
64mb ram (I may upgrade later)
DVD player
8mb ATI video
400mhz Pent2

I will be using this laptop to playback DVD movies, game EMULATORS (SNES9x, MAME etc.), playback MPEG's and AVIs... Thats about it as far as the main functions go...

What should I get to get maximum performance out of this PC?

 

[ludeicruz]

win2k seems like a good choice, a lot more stable and much better power managment than win9x... though a RAM upgrade might be necessary

 

[JutTG]

More suggestions please?

 

[bacillus]

seem to recall that that model wasn't fully ACPI compliant!

 

[Electrode]

It's on a system like this that you'll see just how efficient Linux is. Get a fairly lightweight distro, and install mplayer, snes9x and other emus, and XMMS. There are also lots of games out there that will run just fine on a less-than-top-of-the-line system. I have tons of them on my P-MMX 166 laptop, and they all run great.

 

[alkemyst]

definitely upgrade the RAM, my fathers machine was suxored with 64MB on Win95 and then Win98SE with a PII-450.

Adding a 256MB stick from Crucial was amazing ...when my second (to give me 640MB) would work in mine I stuck it in his to give him 512MB.

Snappy now! bumped his clock speed to 530MHz too.

As far as OS Win2k or XP...98SE is nice, but a bit of a dinosaur now.

 

[Deskstar]

I am almost positive that your Dell model 7000 is NOT Windows XP compliant. It will accept Win 2000 Prof which is what you should use with at least 256mb memory.