loading W98 on laptop..any difference?

[John Prophet]

I have about zero experience messing with laptops...this lady had a laptop and she dropped it and fried the HD...so she bought another hard drive that somehow had W98 loaded in some OEM fashion to where she booted and it asked for a product key etc.....so anyway, now she is saying nothing works blah blah.

She is going to bring it by tomorrow. Its a sony Vaio (sp?)

Anyway, my main question is.....what differences are there as far as loading windows?...just in case I have to format and reinstall?

Are there any differences as far as power management type stuff or whatever?

What about laptop hard drives....if I want to ghost her hard drive , once I have it out of the laptop is it the same old IDE connector??

Any other pitfalls I need to be aware of?

Thanks, JP

The setup is basically the same. At some point it'll ask if you're installing from a PCMCIA drive, which you should answer "No" and then it will load 32-bit PCMCIA drivers.

You can set Pwr. Mgmt. up just like you do on a desktop. By default it has it going into Stdby. and all that goodness. I set the LCD to shut-off after 5mins., the HDD to shut-off after 10mins., and Stdby. after 15mins. That's only running off the battery. I do the LCD after 15mins., HDD after 30mins. and Stdby. NEVER when it's on A/C.

The HDD connector for a laptop is 44-pins. IDE is 40-pin. You need an adapter

You could try just using Ghost via a NIC. Depending on which version you have, version 4 should allow you to Ghost via TCP/IP.

[Scott Tiger]

Yeah, the setup is basically the same unless it's really old (won't boot from a cd and doesn't have the ability to run both a floppy and a cdrom at the same time). The hardest thing I've found yet with laptops is installing RAM and that's not all that difficult. The problem is when you have to find out where the RAM is actually installed. In my old Compaq it's located under the keyboard. It was the last place I thought of looking.

[Xeroid]

Anyway, my main question is.....what differences are there as far as loading windows?...just in case I have to format and reinstall?

The thing that will take a little extra work is the drivers for sound, video, etc if you are just using a Win98 CD instead one of those lovely <sarcasm> restore CDs. I've not been to Sonys website but you can probably find the latest drivers there.