Deleting windows ME from my laptop

[Guest]

I have successfully installed Windows XP home edition in my laptop, without
deleting Windows ME. They are working ok, but very, very slowly!! How do I
delete Windows ME from my sony vaio laptop to save space? I am not concerned
at losing files from Windows ME.
Thanks

 

[Gordon]

I have successfully installed Windows XP home edition in my laptop,
without
deleting Windows ME. They are working ok, but very, very slowly!! How do
I
delete Windows ME from my sony vaio laptop to save space? I am not
concerned
at losing files from Windows ME.
Thanks

If your laptop came with Windows ME are you sure that it is up to spec for
running XP? What RAM have you got installed, and what processor are you
running?

 

[Guest]

There is a -2+ processor 533MH2, 64MB ram and a 6 Gb hard disk. I don't
think I can get extra memory for my sony vaio as it is old now, but works
like a sweety!! I do not load any extra programs, just internet and My
Documents.
If I can get rid of Windows ME, then I thought that it would clear a lot of
space. Sorry, I am not a computer buff, just an amateur!
Thanks for replying. I appreciate it
Shona

 

[Malke]

There is a -2+ processor 533MH2, 64MB ram and a 6 Gb hard disk. I
don't think I can get extra memory for my sony vaio as it is old now,
but works
like a sweety!! I do not load any extra programs, just internet and
My Documents.
If I can get rid of Windows ME, then I thought that it would clear a
lot of
space. Sorry, I am not a computer buff, just an amateur!
Thanks for replying. I appreciate it
Shona

Getting rid of WinME will restore some space, but your computer will
never run faster. Your specs are inadequate to properly run XP, no
matter what the official system requirements are. For a slow but
passable XP experience, one would need a processor running at
800MHz-1GHz, 256MB of RAM. and a 20GB hard drive.

You would be much better off returning the laptop to factory condition.

Malke

 

[Guest]

Thank you for the advice.
I have not been able to transfer CD back-ups of My Documents to the Sony
Vaio laptop ( which has WinME and Word 97) from my PC, which has WinXP and
Word 2003. That is why I am trying to get everything working from the same
application, and am trying to get XP onto my laptop. WinME does not support
microsoft office 2003.
Now another problem is "How do I remove WinXP from my laptop???
I appreciate your help
Shona

 

[Malke]

Thank you for the advice.
I have not been able to transfer CD back-ups of My Documents to the
Sony
Vaio laptop ( which has WinME and Word 97) from my PC, which has
WinXP and
Word 2003. That is why I am trying to get everything working from the
same
application, and am trying to get XP onto my laptop. WinME does not
support microsoft office 2003.
Now another problem is "How do I remove WinXP from my laptop???
I appreciate your help

Since the Office 2003 files are on the XP box, open each document and
choose "Save As". Save in the older Word 97 format. Name the
newly-saved files something like "myfile-Word97.doc" to help keep
track. Now the older laptop will be able to open the files.

To remove XP, you will have to restore the laptop to factory condition
with whatever method the laptop mftr. originally gave you. First boot
the laptop with a WinME startup floppy that will allow you to get to
DOS. If you don't have one, you can download one from www.bootdisk.com.

Then boot with the floppy and at the A: prompt, type:

fdisk /mbr [enter]

This will remove XP's boot files from the Master Boot Record (MBR). Now
do the clean install of WinME. If using the laptop OEM's restore disks,
you probably won't need to install drivers. If using a retail copy of
WinME, get the WinME drivers and any laptop-specific software from the
laptop mftr.'s website *beforehand*. Put on cd-r or floppy.

Malke

 

[Guest]

I have printed out all of your advice, but it sounds really complex!! I have
the recovery discs from Sony, and will just hope that I can cope with it all.
When I tried to load the microsoft office, 2003, it would not open up with
the WinME software. I got the message that there was no application to
support it.
That is why I tried to load XP!
it is so good of you to spend time helping others.
Thanks
Shona

 

[Ken Blake, MVP]

There is a -2+ processor 533MH2,

That's toward the bottom end acceptable for XP, but it's not your real
problem.

64MB ram

That's the real problem. It just meets the minimum requirement for XP, but
in fact is *much* too little to run XP with acceptable speed. Acceptable
performance depends on what apps you run, but never begins below around
256MB

and a 6 Gb hard disk.

Also a tiny amount these days, expecially if you have two operating system
installed on it.

I
don't think I can get extra memory for my sony vaio as it is old now,
but works like a sweety!! I do not load any extra programs, just
internet and My Documents.
If I can get rid of Windows ME, then I thought that it would clear a
lot of space.

If I were you, I would get rid of XP, not Me. Or if you want XP and can't
upgrade your computer, you need to bite the bullet and buy a new computer.

 

[Malke]

I have printed out all of your advice, but it sounds really complex!!
I have the recovery discs from Sony, and will just hope that I can
cope with it all.
When I tried to load the microsoft office, 2003, it would not open up
with
the WinME software. I got the message that there was no application
to support it.
That is why I tried to load XP!
it is so good of you to spend time helping others.
Thanks
Shona

That is correct. You can't run Office 2003 on WinME. The instructions I
gave you were to enable your Office 97 to be able to read the files
created in Office 2003.

Malke

 

[Guest]

Absolutely brilliant!! I have now got my laptop back to original WinME. Thanks.
However, I cannot understand how to get "MY Document "files from my PC with
Office 2003 to load onto the Word 97 in my laptop. The backup disks are
rejected, even though I have Nero software on both computers, and have also
tried re Windows explorer.
Wish you could fly to Scotland to help!!!!
Shona

 

[Travis King]

64MB of RAM is the minimum required by XP, and there's your problem.
Normally with any Microsoft OS, you need to take their recommended amount of
RAM and double it for the minimum of seeing decent performance. Since they
recommend 128MB of RAM, you should get 256MB. General rule of thumb is if
you're using more than 75% of your RAM with your normal workload running,
you need more memory. XP would probably take almost if not all of that 64MB
of RAM alone, so once you do anything else, it will bog down. How's your
hard drive doing? Is your computer's hard drive light constantly blinking
and your hard drive constantly grinding away? That would be due to your low
amount of memory. You really need a minimum of 256MB of RAM for "smooth"
performance, and you really need 512MB or more for "fast" performance. It
used to be back in the XP SP1 and earlier days that 256MB was "fast", but
even that much gets a little slow anymore due to newer applications that use
more RAM and more things built into XP. It is also recommended that you
should do a full (clean) install of XP instead of an upgrade install if you
have everything backed up. I have successfully run XP on an old Compaq 5304
with a 250MHz Cyrix processor and 128MB of RAM with a 4GB hard drive. I do
not really use it, however, but it is pretty sluggish, although it was even
with Windows 98. I did set up a computer for someone else with XP on it on
an old Compaq 5340 with a 400MHz AMD K6 processor and 224MB of RAM with a
4GB hard drive that gets used as the main computer. It's very slow as well,
but it works. If you shut off the Luna appearance, it's almost as fast as
it was with Windows 98. Even with some software and XP, that 4GB hard drive
is just over half full, but I was only able to achieve this by compressing
the entire hard disk drive. I've got an eMachines T1090 as a third computer
with an Intel Celeron 900MHz CPU, 384MB of RAM, and a 40GB WD hard drive,
and it runs XP very well. (It came with XP preinstalled just when XP first
came out, and it originally came with 128MB of RAM and a 20GB Seagate that
has since croaked - it was also the cheapest computer you could get back
then.) It's still running today and running XP very well. The first six
months I had it, the 128MB of RAM ran XP well, but after six months, it
started taking that computer over five minutes to boot up. After dropping
an extra 256MB of RAM in it, that boot time dropped to one or two minutes.
Gaming on that computer is pretty much pointless - you can barely play Quake
III Arena at minimum settings.

 

[Malke]

Absolutely brilliant!! I have now got my laptop back to original
WinME. Thanks. However, I cannot understand how to get "MY Document
"files from my PC with
Office 2003 to load onto the Word 97 in my laptop. The backup disks
are rejected, even though I have Nero software on both computers, and
have also tried re Windows explorer.
Wish you could fly to Scotland to help!!!!

Hey, if you are buying the airline tickets, I'm happy to fly to
Scotland! ;-)

Get on the XP machine that is running Office 2003. Open My Documents. To
make things easy to find, create a new folder and call it something
useful like "files for transfer" or the like. Then open one of the
Word/Excel files (I'm assuming they are Word or Excel files). Go to
File>Save As. In the File type box under the name of the Save file,
click the little drop-down arrow. You will see that you have lots of
choices as to what file format in which to save this file. Choose the
Word 97 .doc (or .xls). Use the browse function to save the file in the
new folder you just made. Repeat with all the other files as needed.
Unfortunately, I don't think you can do this in a batch but will need
to do it one-by-one. You might want to check with the Office experts in
one of the Office newsgroups about that. Here's a list of all the MS
newsgroups so you can find the Office one that is right for you:
http://aumha.org/nntp.htm

OK, now you have all your files converted to the older format. Because
you wisely saved them in a different folder, none of the original files
were overwritten which is A Good Thing Just In Case.

Put a CD-R in the drive and burn the files in the "files for transfer"
folder. Since you have Nero, you want to make a Data CD (not make a
Backup).

Take the finished CD-R and put it in your WinME box. Open the WinME My
Documents and copy the files to it by selecting them, right-clicking on
any of the selected files, dragging into My Documents, and choosing
Copy. Open them in Office 97.

Malke

 

[Ken Blake, MVP]

64MB of RAM is the minimum required by XP, and there's your problem.

I'm not the one with the problem. I responded to the OP saying the same
thing.Please address your replies to the appropriate person.

General rule of thumb is if you're using more than 75% of
your RAM with your normal workload running, you need more memory.

Not at all true. As a general rule, you should not have *any* available RAM.
Available RAM is wasted RAM. You paid for all of it and shouldn't want to
see any of it wasted. Windows works hard to keep all your RAM working for
you all the time, for example using it for cache if your apps don't need it,
then taking it back again if your apps need it later. This is *good*, not
bad.

You really need a minimum of 256MB of RAM for
"smooth" performance, and you really need 512MB or more for "fast"
performance.

That (really need 512MB) is *sometimes* true, but often not. This is *not* a
one-size-fits-all situation. You get good performance if the amount of RAM
you have keeps you from using the page file, and that depends on what apps
you run. Most people running a typical range of business applications find
that somewhere around 256-384MB works well, others need 512MB. Almost anyone
will see poor performance with less than 256MB. Some people, particularly
those doing things like editing large photographic images, can see a
performance boost by adding even more than 512MB--sometimes much more.

If you are currently using the page file significantly, more memory will
decrease or eliminate that usage, and improve your performance. If you are
not using the page file significantly, more memory will do nothing for you.
Go to http://billsway.com/notes_public/winxp_tweaks/ and download
WinXP-2K_Pagefile.zip and monitor your pagefile usage. That should give you
a good idea of whether more memory can help, and if so, how much more.

It is also recommended that you should do a full (clean) install
of XP instead of an upgrade install if you have everything backed up.

I strongly disagree. Although many people will tell you that formatting and
installing cleanly is the best way to go, I disagree. Unlike with previous
versions of Windows, an upgrade to XP replaces almost everything, and
usually works very well.

My recommendation is to at least try the upgrade, since it's much easier
than a clean installation. You can always change your mind and reinstall
cleanly if problems develop.

However, don't assume that doing an upgrade relieves you of the need to
backup your data, etc. before beginning. Before starting to upgrade, it's
always prudent to recognize that things like a sudden power loss can occur
in the middle of it and cause the loss of everything. For that reason you
should make sure you have backups and anything else you need to reinstall if
the worst happens.

 

[Travis King]

I still have to disagree with you. I said 75% on a *normal* workload. If
you go past that normal workload, you may max out your RAM, especially with
smaller amounts like 128MB. You also want some RAM free, as there are new
apps coming out that users install all the time, that in most cases, use
more RAM. Heck, for most regular antivirus programs anymore you need a ton
of RAM alone. If you are always using the maximum amount of RAM, you will
need to upgrade your RAM if you upgrade for instance your office software
that uses more RAM in the new version. If you hit the rooftop, your hard
disk will also work overtime, which will in escence slow your computer down
severely. It will also shorten the life of your hard disk, as it uses
mechanical parts and is known as one of the two least reliable components in
a computer along with the power supply unit. I've noticed on computers that
I've used, when you only have around 15% of your RAM free, it gets really
slow and the hard drive starts working like crazy, but when I add more RAM,
it runs faster. There's no such thing as having enough RAM because having
extra RAM also future-proofs your computer - example, the memory hog Windows
Vista where 512MB of RAM is the minimum. It also is needed for those
particulars that do gaming. Most gaming will use as much RAM as you have,
and the more RAM you have, the better your gaming experience will be. If
your computer had 1GB of RAM, you may not be using much of it now on XP, but
you will on Vista. I'm running Windows Vista on my computer right now, and
it's using 40% of my RAM (1.5GB) with a light workload. Although it's not
exactly true due to memory management, if you took my 1.5GB of RAM and
divided it by 3 to get 512MB of RAM, that would be more than 100% of the RAM
used. I have not installed my full workload on Vista, and I don't intend to
until the final release. (Provided I upgrade.) Now this is not assuming
everyone will upgrade because I know not everyone will, heck, I don't even
know if I am going to yet. (Seeing all the bugs I've run across with it
that haven't been fixed since beta 2 and here I am on RC2.)

 

[Ken Blake, MVP]

I still have to disagree with you. I said 75% on a *normal*
workload. If you go past that normal workload, you may max out your
RAM, especially with smaller amounts like 128MB. You also want some
RAM free, as there are new apps coming out that users install all the
time, that in most cases, use more RAM. Heck, for most regular
antivirus programs anymore you need a ton of RAM alone. If you are
always using the maximum amount of RAM, you will need to upgrade your
RAM if you upgrade for instance your office software that uses more
RAM in the new version.

No, you don't understand how RAM is managed in Windows. You are always using
all (or almost all) your RAM. The point is that even if yor apps don't need
the amount of RAM you have available, the rest will be used for things like
caching. If you upgrade your office software and that needs more RAM, that
means that less RAM may be available for caching.

If you hit the rooftop, your hard disk will
also work overtime, which will in escence slow your computer down
severely.

No, it's not at all that simple. If everything you are doing doesn't fit in
RAM, some of it goes into the page file. How much effect that has on
performance is not simply a matter of what's in the page file. Windows keeps
the most-recently-used used pages in memory, and the least-recently-used
pages in the page file. So if you have a big program loaded, but not
actively been used, it quickly gets paged out and stays paged out. The
effecton performance is almost nothing.

It will also shorten the life of your hard disk,

That's well-established to be simply a myth.

as it
uses mechanical parts and is known as one of the two least reliable
components in a computer along with the power supply unit. I've
noticed on computers that I've used, when you only have around 15% of
your RAM free, it gets really slow and the hard drive starts working
like crazy, but when I add more RAM, it runs faster.

If adding RAM made *your* computer run faster, then the apps you were
running were able to make use of more RAM. That however is *not* true of
everyone's computer.

There's no such
thing as having enough RAM because having extra RAM also
future-proofs your computer - example, the memory hog Windows Vista

That *could* be true. However, one can always buy the extra RAM when one
needs it. No need to buy it in advance. Moreover, many people will want not
just to upgrade their RAM when they go to a new operating system, but often
upgrade or replace the entire computer. So any extra RAM you installed but
didn't need with the thought that you would need it for the next operating
system may in fact go wasted.

 

[Guest]

Dear Malke,
Many, many thanks for your help. I now have re-installed winME in my
laptop, and it is working better than before. I have copied all of My
Documents from WINXP to my laptop. Everything is working fine!! When my
finances improve, I will invest in a new laptop.
Hope life treats you well...you are most generous with your time.
Shona

 

[Malke]

Dear Malke,
Many, many thanks for your help. I now have re-installed winME in my
laptop, and it is working better than before. I have copied all of My
Documents from WINXP to my laptop. Everything is working fine!!
When my finances improve, I will invest in a new laptop.
Hope life treats you well...you are most generous with your time.
Shona

Does that mean you're not sending me the airline tickets? ;-)

I'm very glad you got things sorted and that I was able to help you. It
was my pleasure. Thanks for taking the time to let me know.

Malke

 

[Travis King]

Well, let's just sum it up with this. Regardless of what we say here, we
both pretty much agree that the original poster with the problem would
benefit on XP with more RAM and 64MB is not enough if they wished to use XP.

 

[Ken Blake, MVP]

Well, let's just sum it up with this. Regardless of what we say
here, we both pretty much agree that the original poster with the
problem would benefit on XP with more RAM and 64MB is not enough if
they wished to use XP. "

Absolutely! We have no disagreement at all on that score. 64MB is nowhere
near enough for Windows XP.

--
Ken Blake - Microsoft MVP Windows: Shell/User
Please reply to the newsgroup


Ken Blake, MVP"