Sounds more like a 2001-era desktop from the specs alone, so you could probably get away with Win98/2K on it. XP should still be usable with the ram upgraded like that of course. I'd suggest XP just to access Steam (while you still can) and to not run into any strange "modern" installer issues for "old games".

(a good 2003 laptop would have a Pentium M and a mobility radeon 9000 😀 )

Before you consider installing 98SE or ME, you should make sure you can find appropriate drivers for those first.

After that, well, your decision should come down to what you actually want to do with this computer. If it's just going to collect dust on a shelf, then it hardly matters.

research shows the Radeon 7500 is no slouch.

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/vga-charts-ii,579-6.html ranks it around the GeForce 4 MX. That is better than nothing at all, but only slightly.

And in that period you really could fall into far worse. S3 ProSavage Twister and Intel Extreme were very common

Jorpho wrote:

Before you consider installing 98SE or ME, you should make sure you can find appropriate drivers for those first.

The last time I've checked, Dell still has Windows 98 drivers for the Latitude C640 which is the Inspiron 4150's business counterpart, I've managed to get Windows ME to work on an Inspiron 8200 by using drivers from other Dell laptops with the same hardware components.

I'd install Windows ME if you plan on running games on it, it's more modern than 98SE so it works better on newer hardware and has some convenient features that would require special drivers/software to get on 98 (mainly the USB Mass Storage driver), Windows 2000 is another good choice for general purpose tasks, you can always dual-boot if you want.

As for the RAM: This laptop uses regular old DDR1 SODIMMs so finding larger RAM may be easier than you think, 2GB is (unofficially) the maximum supported which is more than enough for XP, look for memory upgrade kits for Pentium M-era laptops if you think it needs more memory.

So, yeah, Dell only publishes Windows XP drivers for the Inspiron 4150, but, as you suggested, they do publish other Windows versions for the Latitude C640 which appears to be all the same (key) hardware.

I was kind of thinking that Me might be the better choice, being slightly more modern than 98; in fact, I remember I built a budget machine back in 2002-ish that has similar(ish) specs... a Duron 1.3Ghz, some amount of RAM, 20GB HDD, Radeon 7200. I ran Me on it...

The Dell website only explicitly lists drivers for Win98... but maybe there are Me drivers bundled with the 98 drivers? I haven't downloaded them to look yet.

RJDog wrote:

The Dell website only explicitly lists drivers for Win98... but maybe there are Me drivers bundled with the 98 drivers? I haven't downloaded them to look yet.

The Windows 98 drivers will work on Windows Me, since this is an early/mid 2000s laptop I would imagine the drivers are mostly WDM so they're new enough to work on WinMe, I can attest to this because I've used some newer Windows 98 Dell drivers (Crystal CS4205 and 3COM 3C-920) on Windows Me and they were fine.

Another thing to remember is that (on most newer laptops) the graphics card drivers may require DirectX 8.1 or newer to be installed first, so be prepared to have a DirectX installer on hand (can be from an old game CD or downloaded from the internet).

You can always try going direct to the component manufacture, Intel for chipset drivers, ATI for Video drivers, etc
9 times out of 10 they work just fine.