I have an old laptop that's currently running on Win XP, this uses too much resources so i've decided to downgrade to Windows ME. I have both the Win ME CD and start-up/boot disk. The problem is this laptop doesn't have a floppy disk drive. I haven't done this before so i'm not sure how to go about it. Do I burn the contents of the boot disk on to a CD or there another way to do this. Any help, or links to any Windows installation guides would be appreciated.

Without a floppy drive, you have some challenges. There's a great guide here: http://www.hexff.com/win98_install.php Do you have another PC available on which you can make a bootable CD? I don't have an ME CD, so you could help by sending a list of what's on it; like this: [if your CD drive is D:] dir/s/b d:\>MELIST.TXT [enter] Then email the MELIST.TXT as an attachment to: ME@ThaiGuides.com With a P III & 256MB, a better choice might be win98se. M2

You can boot with the XP CD to create/format the hard drive FAT32 Then boot with the ME CD to install

does the laptop have a cd burner and nero? if so you can create a bootable cd using an image from this file: http://www.allbootdisks.com/index.php?option=com_remository&Itemid=42&func=fileinfo&parent=folder&filecatid=1871

Thanks everyone for your feedback! The links you provided were pretty helpful. I finally managed to get my hands on to a floppy disk drive, after an exhaustive search at my local computer swap & meet. The thing is though, the floppy disk drive goes into the same computer socket as the CD-ROM drive, you can only use one external storage device at a time it seems, which i guess means that i'll have to use the boot disk first, then replace the floppy drive with the CD drive to resume formating & installation. Unfortunately I don't have the Win XP CD on me (didn't bother to buy it cause i knew i'd eventually have to replace it), but i do have another desktop pc with both Nero & a burner, so i'm tempted to try the method Mechanix & Leo suggested since it seems a lot less cumbersome than the other options. If you guys have any other ideas plz let me know, and thanx once again for all the great tips.

With the floppy, fdisk and format and copy the config.sys & autoexec.bat and the drivers to HD. Then you're done with the floppy. Put the CD in, boot from HD and run the setup. M2

I'll give that a go Mechanix, I'll check back with you guys if i have any problems. Much obliged.