Windows Forum

Ask something
Discussion Locked

The Promiscuous Portable

0 helpful
5 replies

by genes89

Closed to new repliesThis discussion is closed. It stays readable, but it takes no new replies.

I am a consultant that supports both Novell (4.2 and %.1) and Windows (98 peer-to-peer, NT4, 2000)
networks. My beloved Toshiba Win 98 portable, recently stolen from my car, was set up to connect to each network and worked like a champ. The active protocols are NetBeui, TCP/IP, and IPX/SPX.

My beloved insurance carrier (Hartford through the ICCA) has now sent to me a new Toshiba (SP 6100) and I must choose between Win 2k and Win XPP for my operating system.

I am interested in opinions on which OS will be the most promiscuous. Don't forget we must add an unsupported NetBeui driver to XP. Also, what's the most efficient way to set up my new network adapter to replicate years of tuning. All my networks were reachable the minute I goton site without a reboot to change a setup. I want to reconstruct that configuration all at once.

Thanks in advance for your thoughtful reply.

5 replies

by thechas

In your situation, I would opt for a multi-boot setup.

Partition the drive into at least 2 partitions.
Install either 98 or 2K.
Then, install XP and select the dual boot option during the install process.

This way, you can have clear supportfor your older systems, and be able to help them with the transition to XP.

Chas

by phil.hall

In this situation, I would go with Windows 2000. Purely because of the NetBeui driver being unsupported under XP at this time. The NetBeui driver does work, but Windows 2000 has an actual driver as opposed to one that MS says should be fine.

To replicate your years of tweaking, well, unless we were to know exactly what you mean by that, I'd say we wouldn't be a whole lot of help. But I'd grab the newest client32, and have the ability for you to connect via DOS prompt with the lsl, whatever your network card is (like a 3c90x), ipxodi, vlm (and all those NLMs) route. Also make sure your laptop is formatted FAT32 to make this all easier. But with that comes the standard disclaimer: FAT32 is not secure (like NTFS) and if your laptop is taken again (I hope not) you need to make sure there's no confidential information of any sort stored on it.

Really, there's no reason to dual-boot in this situation if you have FAT32 as your file format.

This discussion is closed to new replies.