Ive got a wierd one here : its a pc-a250 notebook laptop with xp - its had windows 98 installed on it apparantly already but that didnt help either. Any way the pc seems fine untill you try to use the cd rom and it says there is a I/O device error and you basically cant read any cd roms. I then checked the hardware and disabled the PCMCIA adapter and re - enabled it and the cd rom works! I looked for the eithernet connection but that doesn't seem to exist even though I got an eithernet cable attached to it on a live network. So a bit later I restarted and the bloody cd rom is not working again so i did the disable enable trick again and it worked but each time i start up its gone again. the same seems to be happening with the dial up modem but I havn't had a chance to try that out yet. The external floppy drives ok it seems. Any ideas? specs: basically enough to run 98 2000 or xp 300mhz pentium 2 6gb hd 128mb ram

hmmm it seems that xp thinks that there is a panasonic ATAPI CD-ROM Interface Card that the cd rom runs off in side and every time it starts it has the safely remove hardware icon in the tool bar for it which never dissapears?! Can anyone confirm this is this correct - I do not have a manual and cannot download one. I cant even find the driver for this cd rom for anything above windows 95 at the moment. It probably is the right one but jus thought i would ask. Also the modem does not start working after reseting the pcmcia adapter I have just been told.

sorry eithernet is working - my mistake

Hi halp, About this: specs: basically enough to run 98 2000 or xp 300mhz pentium 2 6gb hd 128mb ram Yeah - in theory it's enough to run XP, but only just. I think you'd be better off keeping Windows98 because XP will gobble up your RAM & HardDisk space faster than you can say huh? ___________________________________________ ☺ [Belgium, GMT+1]_________________________svg

it is yer but i just wanna make it work first - its not my laptop so I dunno if i can be bothered to put 98 on it :S