Which OS is preferred by HPTuners?

I just got my new laptop in the mail, it's a NIB IBM 770
Thinkpad 266MHz (yeah, kinda dated, but it has a
hardware serial port and will charge off +12V so it's
a perfect car tuning laptop). I bought it for the sole
purpose of running tuning software. It has 32MB
native RAM and I will be beefing that up ASAP to
160K or better.

It has NT4.0 preloaded but I will want to change over
to either Win98SE (+ service packs) or Win2000, both
of which I have handy.

Which of these (or other?) does HPTuners think poses
the least compatibility issues, what is closest to the
development environment?

I'd say W2K Jimmy. I've worked with it for years on both the Server and Client ends of the arena. It's actually a very good laptop OS and there is lots of command line capability. XP would be too slow on it and has way too much "fluff" in it. And since you're an Excel Guru that and VCM Suite would be the only two items that I would put on it.

I'm using XP with no problems, but my laptop is a little faster. I'd use Win98 on your laptop..just to keep it simple

I also suggest Windows 98 on a slow laptop. Just avoid installing back ground applications and you should be ok. Keep the computers installed software simple and it will work effeciently. Fill it up with clutter and it will just end up getting confused.

Well, I ran into a bit of a snag when trying to go with
98, the WinNT that came installed wouldn't let the
Win98 installer execute and the Win98 boot disk
was too feeble to set up my SCSI CD drive (long
story, don't ask). So I ended up going with Win2K
in the end. It seems to be working well enough
despite the small memory (256M coming in the mail
should really help, the paging right now is really bad).
I had to struggle with getting the COM2 port on the
back of it to set up right, but I got it to go tonight.
I was able to log a lot more successfully than on my
100MHz Toshiba (this one being a blazing 266MHz
IBM). It looks like this setup is going to work out OK.

Jimmy that memory upgrade should fix you up just fine. I will be trying you're Excel A4 file out tomorrow, I will let you know what I think of it.

Yeah, another 256MB of RAM made a world of difference
(about 5% disk thrash instead of full time).

I have been working more on that 'sheet since what
was hosted, CatSkynr said he was going to be out of
touch for about a week so I haven't pushed the
latest up the wire. I'll send you the most recent.
It's not anything fancy like brianw21's, it's just a
"place for everything, and everything in its place"
to facilitate exchanging, analyzing, whatever.