Laptop advice please?

[mrmart]

A friend of mine called me today with problems installing XP on his laptop.

The Laptop is a "toshiba 310cdt". I know very little about laptops and did a search in various search engines and came up with very few results on this particular model. HOwever, one of the results that came up lead me to believe that this model is quite an old model, which he bought for £150 (ripped off?) and called him back to tell him he could be wasting his time trying to install XP on it.

I just basically want to know if what I said was correct about this laptop, or if he was actually ripped off?

I can't give any more details about the specs of his laptop. I did ask him but he doesn't know much about computers. So if anyone is familiar with this particular model, I'd much appreciate any advice or confirmation on my own thoughts.

Thanks in advance

Mart

[Steve R Jones]

Quick search resulted in some bios updates dated 2000...

It's probably too old for XP. What does happen when he tries to install?

PROCESSOR (All models)
Intel Pentium 200Mhz (1.8v/2.5v) Yes: with MMX support
External data bus width 64 bit
External data/address bus speed 66 MHz
Integrated Coprocessor Yes
Processor Cache 32KB: (16KB code; 16KB data)

MEMORY: 16Mbit EDO DRAM, 3.3V (All Models)
Standard 32MB
Maximum 160MB

VIDEO (All models)
Memory: 4Mbit EDO DRAM, 3.3V 2 MB
Speed 50ns
Hyper Page mode support Yes
Controller Chip Chips &Technologies 65555
PCI Bus Architecture w/burst mode Yes: 32-bit, 33 MHz
Graphics Accelerator: Yes with 64-bit BitBLT support
Data Bus Width 64-bit
DirectDraw, Direct3D, H/W Cursor Yes

HDD (2.5” Enhanced IDE; 12.7mm high)
Removable1 HDD 2.1 billion bytes (12-13 msec)




The official specs are here SATELLITE 310 Series Product Specifications 310CDT ...


So the specs in short:
P200MHz MMX/32MB/2GB HDD/2MB video

I'm not sure if your friend was ripped off or not, but i'm sure that winXP will not run on that system .. anyway, it "might" run with 160MB of memory installed but very very slow with that CPU.

Steve R Jones is correct, a BIOS was released on 2000 but unfortunately to support win2k not XP.
ACPI Flash BIOS version 8.00 for Satellite 305/310/315 was released on 02-04-2000 ro support win2k.

*A change was made to support Windows 2000.
*Corrected a problem that made installing a driver from the FDD impossible, when a new device was detected during the Windows 98 installation.
*A power off failure when running Windows NT, with SP4, was corrected.
*Corrected a problem that, with "USB Legacy=Enabled", in the BIOS setup, entering some keys using a Japanese USB keyboard was impossible.