dell latitude xpi p133st

You can start here:

 

http://support.dell.com/support/edocs/dta/_titan/

 

According to the spec on this machine there is no built-in CD drive and it has a maximum RAM of 40 MB.  It will probably run MS DOS and Windows 3.1 or Windows 95 ok, but anything later is doubtful.  If you don't have a hard drive already you may have difficulty finding one to fit it.  The tech notes indicate that Dell only guaranteed compatibility with drives ordered from them.  I've never seen one of these so I can't speak from experience.

 

Good luck.

 

 

OK, ran across your earlier post on the Win XP board.  The link I gave you will essentially get you much of the info that TGSmith gave you in his links.  With that in mind I thought I might give you some additional things to contemplate.

 

This machine is pretty old and has no built in CD drive.  I never had to use one myself, but I started on a Dell 486 laptop that had much the same arrangement.  I have already mentioned it will likely be difficult to find a hard drive for this computer, and the size will likely be limited to 10 GB or maybe 20 GB from a bios perspective.  If you are limited to using MS DOS and Windows 3.1, the size will be more like 2 GB max.  In order to use a larger hard drive you will need to load at least Win95 OSR 2 as earlier versions of Win95 had nearly the same limits as MS DOS.  You will also need to do some research to see if you can match a CD drive to the machine.  Only the first release of Win95 was available on 3.5" floppy.  Everything after that was on CD.  On my old 486 it was necessary to purchase a PCMCIA card interface for a CD ROM drive.  Mine was a Panasonic and it is necessary to have a separate power source for the drive itself.  You will then need to make a 3.5" startup floppy with the drivers for the interface PCMCIA card and the drive itself, write appropriate config.sys and autoexec.bat files to load them along with MS DOS.  You then would need to execute FDISK from the floppy drive to create the needed partition and format the drive using the necessary commands to transfer the system files from the floppy to the hard drive.  To install Win95 or maybe Win 98 as recommended by TGSmith you put the CD into the drive, change the working drive to be the CD drive, and execute setup.

 

This is a lot of work, and only you can decide if using the computer is worth going through all the steps.

 

Again, good luck to you!