Need help to install XP but no floppy and cdrom

[muzrix]

hi guys

i need some help to install win xp at my sister notebook.
The problem is her notebook does'nt have floppy & cdrom drive.
Actually this notebook already xp in it but many problem occur (always freeze) and i decide to format and reinstall xp back

Is that possible to format/install notebook from other than floppy & cdrom?
If it so then how?

Anyway, the notebook model is
Acer Travelmate 340T
Pentium 3, 128 memory

 

[denster]

Well 1st of all, 128MB of memory is not enough to run XP efficiently.

What is the speed of your processor?
And what size is your hard drive?

 

[denster]

Dude, you might as well give it up with that old thing.

 

[pscowboy]

That notebook came with an external combo drive connection, incorporating a floppy and a 24x CD-Rom drive. Where is it? If it's been lost or damaged, it must be replaced to continue with this machine. Ebay may be an option for that.

It also can be upgraded to 256 ram, which would be passable to run a conservative XP.

I would evaluate the cost of that upgrade as a variable to continue on. Check with various memory makers for their solution.

That unit also came stock with a 6g hd. If that is what is in there, you won't be able to run XP. You'd need 30g to run conservatively - Web & Email.

Combo-drive, ram, & hard drive issues have to be resolved to consider carrying on.

 

[DarkMarc]

Despite what everyone else says, your Laptop CAN runn win xp easily. My old pentium 3 450Mhz with 128MB of ram and 10 gig hard drive has xp installed and it runs just as quick as it does on my P4 3.2Ghz with 1GB of ram. Just make sure you do not overload it with heaps of programs and rnning processes, otherwise performance wil suffer.
As for installing win xp without a cd or floppy drive, your best bet is to use an external optical drive. maybe it's possible to do it with a 1 GB bootable USB stick but i'v never tried

 

[denster]

Despite what everyone else says, your Laptop CAN runn win xp easily. My old pentium 3 450Mhz with 128MB of ram and 10 gig hard drive has xp installed and it runs just as quick as it does on my P4 3.2Ghz with 1GB of ram

Are you crazy? How can a processor that runs at 450Mhz run windows as fast as one that runs at 3.2Ghz???

That's like saying a cow can outrun a gazelle. Something must be wrong with your system.

 

[DarkMarc]

well I am only human and differences of miliseconds are hard to differentiate for me. let me rephrase that for you then: my p3 450 with 128 mb of ram runs win xp almost as wel as my p4 3.2Ghz with 1 gig of ram. Of course if you're going to start running applications and heaps of processes in the background, then the difference will become noticeable.

 

[pscowboy]

The 6g hard drive would kill the deal. You had a 10.

After all patches are installed, plus the swap file, XP would be approaching 3.5g of space usage. A couple of apps later, plus Outlook Express usage - ALL GONE!

BTW, where is muzrix??

 

[DarkMarc]

I doubt it. On my 10 gig hard drive, most of the space was used up on games.

 

[blaumer]

You could use a 6Gb Hdd for WinXP, though I wouldn't reccommend it. I have a VIA EpiaV (claiming to be 1GHz, runs about as fast as a PIII 500) system with an 8Gb drive, WinXP, OfficeXP Pro (typical install), a copy of the source and about 60Mb of driver files on it and it uses about 4.5 gb. If I clean up the unnecessary files, I could get that to about 3.5-3.8Gb. That's including a fairly sizable swap file. You could out about another 2 GB worth of data/software on it before it get's dangerous. For a device that old, you aren't likely to be loading multi CD games on it. It will be slow. Quite noticably when compared to a 3GHz+ pc.

As far as installing XP, I don't think a USB thimb drive will be a viable option. Unless a seperate cardbus USB adapter is included, the device is in all likelyhood using usb 1.1 if it has USB at all. That would take about a day to install from (I may be exaggerating, I don't really know). EBay for the drive that would have been included with the laptop is your only really good option.