Hi

I have been offered a choice of one of three old laptops to keep & I'm not really sure which is going to be most useful to me.

The background is: I want a simple Windows laptop to use for stuff like VAG-Com, Humaxcheck (my Humax hard drive is playing silly buggers) & similar. All our home computers are Mac (PPC). At work I have a shiny new Dell Precision M6500 running Windows 7 but I don't want to mess with that.

I've been offered one of:

Dell Latitude CP M233ST running Windows 98. Info on this here. Advantage of this one is that it has a serial port & a swappable CD/Floppy drive. Disadvantage is that it's ancient.

Dell Latitude CSx H500XT running Windows ME. Info on this Here. No serial port but swappable CD/Floppy drive. Looks in good condition.

Acer Travelmate 4020 running Windows XP pro. Info on this Here. Advantage of this one is it seems to be the most modern & is already running XP. Disadvantage is it seems slow (but might just need TLC)

I guess the first two could be persuaded to run XP with varying degrees of success. I don't need internet etc; just to be able to run the odd Windows utilities that I can't do with my Mac's.

Which would you choose?

Wouldn't worry about serial support, as you can't get (genuine) serial cables for VCDS AFAIK. Likewise, who uses floppies anymore?

the Acer Travelmate 402

If there's any chance you've still got the XP disk and drivers, Clean reinstall the OS, with bare min of other software installed.

You could treat it to a little more memory - at least 1Gb - shouldn't cost too much these days.

Edited 23 November, 201015 yr by snow_muncher

If you have a macbook/pro, just create a small bootcamp partition running xp

Another vote for the Travelmate.

+1 for total wipe + clean install and cheapo RAM upgrade.

Wouldn't bother with ME or 98 nowadays.

WTF is a floppy drive?

If you don't have the XP Media there is no need to do a clean install just remove all the crap programs that you will never use - dissable any un-needed services (some good lists about of minimum services required by XP) run CCleaner and get rid of all the Temp cr4p that builds up on systems when people don't know what they are doing (this is all assuming that is not carrying a load of infections - if so start with one of the bootable CD scanners like AVG Boot CD)

My laptop for running VAGCOM is a PIII 1GHz has 256MB RAM and is running XP SP2 with room to spare

I opted for the Acer Travelmate.

I have created a new account, deleted the originals owners accounts, removed Zonealarm, AVG & ('something'?)shield & it's running way faster now. Will try a few of the other 'minimalist' suggestions later.

Cheers for all the advice.

Darren

Do you want any tips of how to search the registry for autoloading programs ?

Do you want any tips of how to search the registry for autoloading programs ?

Thanks. I followed this guide but erring on the side of caution. Laptop seems really snappy now!

I just need to get myself a cable or a caddy or whatever now & have a play with Humaxcheck.

stick ubuntu on it, more lightweight than winders.

stick ubuntu on it, more lightweight than winders.

Could do but I have 6 Mac's here, so I have all the Unix I could ever need. What I didn't have was a method of running those occasional little utilities that are Windows only.

Edited 24 November, 201015 yr by The Ors

That will only get rib of services, which are normally not used to run many messenger/auto-update clients/spyware programs

Fire up "regedit" from the windows command line - search for "Key" values called "Run" - example:

You can always post up a pic if unsure about what you've found

stick ubuntu on it, more lightweight than winders.

Can't run VAG-COM/VCDS/etc ...

That will only get rib of services, which are normally not used to run many messenger/auto-update clients/spyware programs

Fire up "regedit" from the windows command line - search for "Key" values called "Run" - example:

You can always post up a pic if unsure about what you've found

Thanks. Will give that a go over the weekend.