get a external CD drive best buy
If your laptop has a PCMIA slot, then obviously you can plug the card in. Check the box that comes with what you buy, it should tell you in numerous places what it's compatible with.
Yes. There are a couple ways you could do this. 1. You could purchase an external CD-ROM drive that connects to the parallel port. Using a special DOS boot floppy and driver, you could then launch the Windows 98 setup CD. 2. You could remove the laptop's hard drive, plug it into another computer, install Windows 98, and then place it back. It will likely be missing some drivers, but you can supply these on floppies.
"ROM Basic" refers to the BASIC interpreter found in old IBM PCs. When the hard drive was not installed properly, you would be dropped into the BASIC interpreter instead. Most PC clones, including your laptop, do not include a BASIC interpreter. Make sure that you have installed the hard drive properly, and that you have installed an operating system on it. Otherwise, the laptop will not be able to boot.
I use a parallel port Zip Drive... If your computer doesn't have a network card you can still move your data or files utilizing your serial port. You will need software to do this but it is very simple. There is a software bumble called PC Re locater and is available at STAPLES for about $15 this includes the software that you will need and even comes with a cat5 cable and a file transfer cable or serial cable. The software is awesome it does everything for you. You just basically tell the software what file you want to transfer over to your PC and it does the work for you. It' that simple. Take the hard drive out of the laptop and connect it to the other computer. You will need to get a converter device so you can plug the 2.5" drive into the ribbon cable designed for 3.5" drives. Or you can get USB drive en closers made to hold the smaller drives that you can simply plug into the USB port of the computer.