How do I completely remove Windows 98 from a computer?
My laptop died a little while ago (someone of the more diehard Flutheranians may remember that from a previous question) Soon, I’ll be purchasing a new one, but in the interim, I’m using my Dad’s old one (Compaq Armada 7400, Pentium II) It’s saddled with Windows 98, and I’m wanting to make it a bit more useful and install Windows XP. Whenever I try this, however, it tells me that 98 can’t be upgraded to XP. So, I want to start from scratch and dump 98 altogether, then install XP anew. But I can’t figure out how to remove 98, as the XP installation won’t give me the option to remove the current operating system.
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4 Answers
Hm…
The problem is whether you are okay with losing all of the data on the drive—if you are, then you should be able to tell XP to repartition the drives, which will force it to reformat the drives.
Of course, if you are trying to install XP from an XP Upgrade disk, you will need to upgrade 98 to something else first (2000?) before you can upgrade it to XP.
Using a pentium II in this day and age is an exercise in futility. Unless you live in a third world country you should not be wasting your time with such an outdated computer. If you insist on using it, just leave 98 on there, or at most reload 98. Do not bother trying to install XP, your first roadblock will be the 64mb ram requirement, then it will be booting from cd, then it will be no USB, then it will be your tiny and slow hard drive getting destroyed by windows pagefile. You’re gonna need to put $300–400 into that thing to get it to run xp. Sorry to disappoint you kid, it’s just not in the cards.
Here’s an idea. Why not format the hard drive and install Linux. If it’s only a temporary situation, you can try Linux to see if you like it. There are plenty of apps for Linux. If the laptop has enough memory, you can use KDE or Gnome which are similiar enough to Windows that you can find your way around.
@dogboi: Good thought
You could “try it” using a live cd—assuming the computer will boot from CD. Older computers (a Pentium II should do it) may not be able to boot from the CD drive, but you can try it.
Try ubuntu: http://www.ubuntu.com/
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