Legit Reviews

A friend wants me to upgrade his Dell XPS T550 from 98 to XP Home, has anyone done this?
I have a Dell OS Reinstallation CD but I know it was not meant for this computer!
My big question is the drivers, how much trouble are they going to be?

I'm going to say they will be a pain to find. Dell will have not supported the drivers beyond win98, so unless the hardware is that generic the drivers are in win xp, then it will be mostly driverless.

Does the machine have the power to run XP?

Dan

If I remember right, that's a 550Mhz P3 processor. I don't remember how many ram slots it has, but in order for that processor to even run XP, you are going to need to strip the fluff from the OS, and put in as much ram as it will hold. I wouldn't expect to do much beyond surfing and word processing on it... maybe a little solitaire and freecell to fill out your gaming urge.

i had XPpro on my 80GB hdd (before i had this pc going) with a P3 600E with 96mb of RAM it took FOREVER to install it, but it did work ok

Yes it is a P3 550, I have already upped the memory to 768MB(maxed out, 3 slots @ 256 each) from the original 128. It has a DVD drive with the decoder card, I plan on updating that to something a bit newer before I do the OS upgrade.
His usage will be web surfing, email, word processing and solitaire for the most part.
Drivers are my main concern, audio and video.

Audio could be troublesome, but the video drivers should be easy, do you have any driver disks for the '98SE, on old stuff the original drivers are sometimes the ONLY ones that work...sometimes.

The original Dell discs are available! He has them, I believe there are 2 discs. it has an SB audio card, not exactly sure which one. I will probably have to pull the card and look for a model number. The video card is a Diamond 16MB card like the audio card I will have to look and see what card it is.

BUT....
I contacted Dell support and they do not recommend doing the OS upgrade before a processor upgrade!

camaroguy1998 wrote:BUT....
I contacted Dell support and they do not recommend doing the OS upgrade before a processor upgrade!

lol, are there actually any CPU's that you could upgrade to that are still around?

Dan

I have a Compaq mini tower 5204 that's running Win-XP from a Win-98SE upgrade. Right now, Win 98SE to XP Home upgrades are $99 at Office Max until supplies run out.

The processor is an AMD 500Mhz (Chomper series), the memory is 640Mb, HDD is 10Gb and the graphics an ATI Rage LT Pro.

Like DaIceMAn said, don't load the extra fluffy stuff for the XP OS.

If I had a PnP PCI NIC card for this machine, it would be folding too.

Now, to your question about the drivers ... Most of the time Windows XP will use a set of generic drivers to install. In many cases, these generic drivers are actually better than the OE drivers for the machine. Many OE vendors even refer people to use the XP OS drivers. So, your chances of just loading XP onto the machine and running fine are great. XP also solves many of the USB issues that Win98SE and Win-ME had. I've never had any problem loading XP onto any old computer going as far back a 233Mhz machine.

As for VISTA, you're lucky to find anything backward compatible or even newly compatible to make it work right!

A big part of this is not to spend any money on it!
The 768mb of memory was donated by a friend who works for Unisys that was pulled from new old systems. He also donated a copy of a Dell Reinstallation disc and key. It is a full version and I'm not sure how that's going to work trying to do an upgrade! Thats what worries me about drivers. It definitely needs a reload even if I dont go to XP! The load thats on there now is still the original install from 1999!

I think I'm going to do a fresh install and see what happens. If it doesnt work I'll just have to reinstall 98!

Thanks for all the input!

Dan....I doubt I'd be able to upgrade the CPU enough to make a difference! LOL

Stev....You having a system running XP on a 500MHZ CPU is what tells me to go for it!

camaroguy1998 wrote:
Stev....You having a system running XP on a 500MHZ CPU is what tells me to go for it!

Not only that, but I've gotten a difficult Packard-Bell 233Mhz machine to run XP Home that had issues with Win-98SE upgrade over it's original 98 edition. XP worked great to fix the 98SE problems. That machine could only hold a max of 256Mb of RAM, but still worked well on XP.

does amount of RAM matter more than CPU speed? or is it as long as there is an equality(less RAM+faster CPU = More RAM+slower CPU)

Well things didnt go according to plan. The Reinstallation CD given to me has some major scratches and was not able to do the install. So I wound up using an XP Pro disc and key that wasnt being used anymore(Comp died several months ago) This install went fine and I ran Win updates and so far everything seems to be fine! The only issue at the moment is a DVD-Rom thats not working properly. It doesnt seem to want to read a disc. I have another so I will switch them sometime tomorrow(xmas eve) Luckily I installed a CD-RW also and its working fine!

XP did install good drivers(so far) for everything. XP recognized the video card and loaded proper drivers for it and it loaded generic drivers for the audio card which so far is working fine!
I'm going to let it run for a couple days and see how it goes!

Thanx everyone for all the input!

by skierkid450 on Sun Dec 23, 2007 10:16 pm
does amount of RAM matter more than CPU speed? or is it as long as there is an equality(less RAM+faster CPU = More RAM+slower CPU)

I havent run it hard yet but the memory usage never went above 300MB out of the 768MB installed. That makes me feel good about how well its running!