Boot & Bootstraping: Booting is the sum of tasks a computer completes until loading the Operating System. You have read before about the "boot order" option in BIOS. This is the order in witch the computer searches for a media containing a Operating System.
Now that you have your computer starting, you are probalbly getting a message like "Missing Operating System". Now you must choose an Operating System. The operating system is a software component that manages hardware resources and ensures funtionality of programs.
There are two large players in the operating system's field: Microsoft's Windows and Open Source Linux. I will now byte my tongue becouse asuming you are totaly new to computers i will slightly encourage you to use Windows.
| System Configuration | Recomended Microsoft Product. | Needed drive space |
| 386 40 MHZ ~4 Mb RAM | MS-DOS 622 & Widnows 3.1 | ~20 Mb |
| 486 100 MHz ~8 Mb RAM | Windows 95 | ~100 Mb |
| pentium 1 133 MHz ~16 Mb RAM | Windows 98 | ~200 Mb |
| Cyrix 300 MHz / Pentium 2 233 MHz ~64 Mb RAM | Windows 98/ME | ~200/~500 Mb |
| Pentium 2 233 MHz >64 Mb RAM | Windows XP | ~1 Gb |
If i did not convince you to refuse Linux, There is plenty of documentation about it on the net, namely on . I should let you know that altdought this site was written entirely under Linux i am still not confortable using it. Maybe the 4 years of windows have talken their toll.
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