I'm planning on wiping out our hard drive and "starting over" with a clean installation of Dell Win98SE.Computer is a 1998 Dimension XPS T500.I'm wondering, before doing this, and besides the standard "back up your stuff" warnings, if there are other routine maintenance procedures, or anything like that, I should do before sweeping house.Main concern is internet (cable modem) connectivity - I don't have another PC to use to get needed software ahead of time.Thanks,Andrew

Morning Anderw,Your XPST500 will take a 1 gig pentium chip, just plug it in. They are cheap now days, and the double speed will be very noticable. I did mine three years ago. Best update you can make.Bob

Do you have a Dell restore CD/boot floppy or do you have an identifiable Win98SE CD/boot floppy? The former will cause you to reinstall the computer as delivered. The latter will place a copy of Win98SE on the C: drive. You would then require the drivers for the peripherals, such as, motherboard controller chip, graphics, audio, modem drivers. Dell may have provided a disk or CD with the drivers.If you have a Dell restore disk, it may only allow you to have one or two partitions, i.e., C:, D:, on your hardrive. The restore will totally control the disk drive during installation. Two partitions may be sufficient if your hardrive is 40GB or less. If larger, then making more partitions makes separating different functions, i.e., office tasks, gaming, operating system easier to manage. The problem will be during the restore, the entire disk drive will be reformatted and you will lose everything on the drive(s). Therefore, storing updated drivers on the drives is not an option.If you have a standard Win98SE CD/boot floppy, you have the ability to install the operating system (OS) to the C: drive and leave everything intact on other partitions. In this case, you can store updated drivers on the other partitions for use after you reinstalled the OS. After you have finished reinstalling and updating the drivers, you can then reformat the other partitions as necessary, or just delete the unregistered files one at a time.If you want to make partitions on a hardrive, you use FDISK and then FORMAT to prepare your disk drive. There are also commercial products, such as, Partition Magic, that will accomplish the task. Since you are using Win98SE, I recommend you don't make partitions larger than 10GB. Larger partitions under FAT32 suffer from inefficient use of the diskdrive due to cluster size.If you have a CD burner, you can always download the updated drivers and burn them to a CD. If Dell provided a driver CD, you can use those drivers until you get your computer running on the internet, then download updated drivers.Another alternative is to update to WinXP. Many of the drivers for older computers peripherals are included as default on the WinXP CDs. That is not to say, you wouldn't still download updated drivers for the motherboard controller chips, etc., for better performance. Bare in mind that WinXP does use more RAM than Win98SE, just because it loads more programs during boot.W. Sieffert

Hi Bob - Actually a few years ago I put a 1.2 Tualatin (Celeron) - I'm guessing the 1 gig pentium would outperform it - where could I find one?Thanks,Andrew>Morning Anderw,>>Your XPST500 will take a 1 gig pentium chip, just plug it in.>They are cheap now days, and the double speed will be very>noticable. I did mine three years ago. Best update you can>make.>>Bob

Thanks for the info - I do believe I have both the Win98SE and Dell disks.I'm considering going to XP... I don't know if I could expect any type of performance increase from it, though.BTW my HD is only 12 gigs! :)Thanks,Andrew

Hi,Price watch has them starting at $60.00. You need an SECC2, PIII, P/N BX80526H1000256SL4KL. I do not know if it is faster than a Cellery.Bob

I would check to see if your BIOS supports a larger diskdrive. If not, see if an update BIOS is available. If so, I would get a bigger hardrive. If you only put the OS and flight simulator on this computer, then it should work okay. Just don't put anything else on it.W. Sieffert

>I'm planning on wiping out our hard drive and "starting over">with a clean installation of Dell Win98SE.>>Computer is a 1998 Dimension XPS T500.>>I'm wondering, before doing this, and besides the standard>"back up your stuff" warnings, if there are other routine>maintenance procedures, or anything like that, I should do>before sweeping house.>>Main concern is internet (cable modem) connectivity - I don't>have another PC to use to get needed software ahead of time.>>Thanks,>AndrewEven when doing a format a HD isn't truly wiped clean,the same info is still there just harder to read. A utility disk like Wipe Drive actually wipes a HD and makes all info impossible to read. 12 gigs for a HD is really small,I'd bet your BIO would let you install a HD of at least 20-40 gigs. Drives that small can be had pretty cheap and a copy of WinXP Home would be much better than the Dell OS with a the extra junk installed. Good luck....David

Hi all,Well, XP's installed - but that's it so far... (And thanks for the notes on the BIOS and larger HDs... will get one.I am trying to get my controllers recognized.. New thread!cheersAndrew

Well having the same system as you, XPS T500. All I did before I went to XP was upgraded Bios to A11, it was easy and worked perfectly and I am currently running an 80GB hard drive with a ATA 133 card. You won't regret going to XP, as for getting a 1 GHZ PIII, there impossible to find becauses the T500 uses a 100 FSB instead of a 133 FSB, so it's much more difficult to find one, and they are rather expensive, which is why I haven't upgraded.

Thanks for the info, Kurt - I have no idea how to upgrade my BIOS... does it have to be done pre-XP?Thanks,Andrew>Well having the same system as you, XPS T500. All I did>before I went to XP was upgraded Bios to A11, it was easy and>worked perfectly and I am currently running an 80GB hard drive>with a ATA 133 card. You won't regret going to XP, as for>getting a 1 GHZ PIII, there impossible to find becauses the>T500 uses a 100 FSB instead of a 133 FSB, so it's much more>difficult to find one, and they are rather expensive, which is>why I haven't upgraded.