So I bought an old laptop on ebay (ibm thinkpad x24) and it has no floppy or cd-rom. How can I install a fresh copy of xp on it? I guess I would have to boot from the network, a flash card or a usb key but I have no clue on how to do this. Any help?
Alright, I figured out how to boot from a USB key. You guys should really stop being so negative, just because you don't know how to do something doesn't make it incredibly hard or impossible.
There are a few ways this can be done. If you laptop can boot from the USB ports you can copy the Windows CD over to a 1GB or 2GB Flash drive and try to install. But you have to make sure you get all the files from the CD.
Again this would require the USB to do so. Copy all the files over and if done correctly you should be able to isntall right from the files stored on your hard drive. This isnt guaranteed to work since you already have a OS installed.
600MHZ - how did you manage to get in done in the end?
Oh and the laptop sounds like it was a bisnes model in my last job I had to request a spare one, when it was delivered it was a tiny external CD/DVD reader that plugged into a PCI slot.