New O/S for old laptop?

My son has an old laptop which was provided to him when he started college - he graduated last year. He wants to format it "clean" and install a new O/S, but we don't know which ones it might support.

This is an IBM ThinkPad 380D, with a 150 mHz Pentium (original Pentium, not II or III or anything) processor and 48 MB of RAM. It was delivered with a highly customized version of Win95, configured with the programs the college expected all students to use, and ready to access the school's LAN, which was set up with some customized version of Novell Netware. We use Microsoft Networking on our home LAN, and we can't plug the laptop into the network here, because the existing Novell software interferes with the Microsoft software. And we can't uninstall Novell, because it demands that we insert a CD that we no longer have.

Anyway, we'd like to just dump the whole thing and start over. My son originally wanted to put Windows 2000 Professional on it, but according to Microsoft's webpage, this machine isn't powerful enough for that. Does anyone have any suggestions as to which Microsoft O/S we CAN install on it? (And how to go about it, if we "format: C:" it - I know that this means you lose the CD drivers, which makes installing from CD difficult.)

Thanks in advance...

 

I wouldn't recommend anything beyond 95B for that trooper (98 FE might work... SLO-O-OWLY). Anything beyond that is going to suffer performance hits and a LOT of swap-filing (with attendant chances for page fault errors). 48 MB is pathetic by today's standards.

You might consider an alternative such as Linux.

As for reloading, Ultimate Boot Disk provides CD support for this activity. There are other boot-disk programs available.

The 95 on the machine may include the option in Control Panel > Add/Remove Programs > Startup Disk to create a floppy with the CD driver on it.

 

*nix

Give one of the various flavors of linux or bsd a try.
I 've seen/experienced some of these run very well on laptops.

 

This is my son's old laptop, and he is the least computer-geekish person in the family. He can cope with just about every flavor of Windows, but there's no way he's going to learn any kind of *nix, or any of the other non-M$ systems that are out there.

Does anyone know if NT 4 might work on this old machine?