If you want to go online with Wifi you'll need XPSP3 or XPSP2 plus the patch kb????? for WPA2. Afaik (not sure) the older OSs are limited to WPA1 = do'nt work. XP is 100% stable and runs (more or less) fast on systems with +256MB RAM (i've had one before) but it is HD-swaping a lot. This should'nt be a problem for your SSD, but your CPU is really slow. You probably know this, i type it anyway: Do'nt update IE6 to 8, re. videos forget MediaPlayer: If VLC is too heavy, try SPlayer, for mp3 old WinAmp (i use v 5.08) is best, if you switch off the XP-themes, "active-desktop" and 10 (or so) *services* nobody needs, XP becomes a lot more *snappy*.

edit, i forgot: Try OpenOffice 3.2 (2009 or 2010), works fine.

Tricia McMillan wrote:

runs (more or less) fast on systems with +256MB RAM (i've had one before) but it is HD-swaping a lot.

I'd recommend having at least 128MiB more (= 384MiB) if running XP SP1. Back in the day when our family had got a Pentium III (~733MHz ?) there was a noticable improvement in speed in comparison to 256MiB.
Another improvement occured at 768MiB, btw. And 2GiB+ on our later Athlon PCs (running XP SP2). 😀

Speaking of memory limits, XP SP2 x86 can handle about up to 3,5 GiB just fine depending on
video card memory and things like the actual configuration of the PCI address space (just below 4GiB). 😀

OK, the 560 is too weak, but the 600E has enaugh RAM = 544 MB. I'm currently on 512MB, when XP has started and is idle, i still got 320 MB left = sufficient for everything i'm doing here. If you really got 64 GB SSD, swapping is no issue (SSD = rocket), but i'd like to mention my experience for *normal* hds: The old recommendation by MS (and virtually everybody) to use 100% to 150% of RAM as swapfile is wrong. When low on memory, XP shifts itself to hd - what is good. But as soon as there is more free RAM, it should swap it's memory back - which it does the less, the bigger the swapfile is. With a really big one, it does'nt swap back at all = your hd keeps hding all the time = swapswapswapswapswap... I'm using 256 MB = 50% which has proofed to be fastest.

P.S.: If the little red rubber cap of the mouse-stick (i've forgotten the IBM-term for it) is loose, it can be fixed with a very little drop of super-glue.

The 600E would be fine with XP, but probably better with 2K. 560X is so old that I have no idea. The versions of Windows that tend to run best on laptops are the versions that were mainstream when the laptops were released, as there would be more/better drivers available for the hardware.

Some WiFi vendors (e.g., RaLink) have working WPA2 support pre-XP, if you use their utility.

honestly 98SE on both

Honestly at this point I am leaning towards 2000 on the 600E, and NT 3.51 / NT 4.0 partitions on the 560X in addition to the current lineup of DOS, Win95, and Win98SE. I'm only going ham on the boot options with the 560X because I have this gigantic 128 GB drive in it.

I will make some follow up posts on my progress.

A preliminary report:

I have installed Windows 2000 Pro SP4 on the Thinkpad 600E. So far I am very impressed. It is snappy and responsive, and all of the software I have tried on it seems to run just as fast or faster than it did on 98SE. So far I have installed RetroZilla, VLC, WMP9, 7-Zip, and the PowerLeap CPU Control Panel to re-enable the L2 cache on the CPU... since it is an upgraded Pentium III and the 600E won't boot with one of those unless you disable L2 in the BIOS.

It seems to be faster on the network too. I was getting close to 2000 kbps download speed over the WiFi from my local FTP server, as opposed to a max of about 700-ish on 98SE. RetroZilla loads pages fast and seems to work well.

Everything is nice and stable. I played some videos with VLC, and they were fast and didn't slow to a crawl slowly over time like they did on 98SE. Did have to enable L2 cache to get them to play smoothly, though.

So far, so good with the 600E. But the 560X is another story. Since it doesn't have a CD drive, I am somewhat limited. I thought I'd install NT 3.51 via floppy disks, but there are 22 of those disk images, and most of them are that weird extended capacity format, and not the standard 1.44 MB. I'm going to have to figure out something else. I have a PCMCIA CD drive, but it is missing a power adapter. Maybe I can find one somewhere and get it working, in which case I could install either NT 3.51 or NT 4.0, or maybe both. We will see. Part of me also wonders how Windows 2000 would perform on the 560X.