Hi, I recently bought a refurbished Thinkpad. It came with
Win 98SE loaded, a COA but no CD of the operating system (I
knew that when I bought it). The COA sticker has the Win
98SE product key printed on it. There's no installation
folder on the hard drive.

I also run Win 98SE on my desktop. Can't find the Win98SE
upgrade CD, but I have a collection of diskettes/CD's all
the way from MS-DOS to Win 98. For the desktop I made a
boot diskette with CD drivers, then burned a recovery CD
with the CAB files etc. from the installation folder plus
some useful utilities, so I can reload 98SE. (I retrieved
the desktop's product key from the registry.)

Question #1: if I ever need to reinstall Win 98SE on the
laptop, can I use the CD I burned with the CAB files from
my desktop, and the product key on the laptop's COA? I
guess I'd have to create a new boot diskette for the laptop
to make sure I had the correct CD driver, right?

Question #2: The latest full operating system I have is
Windows 3.11. Thereafter I just have upgrade versions. If
one of these systems requires an OS reload, am I correct in
thinking that I would have to start by reloading Win 3.11,
then upgrading to Win 95, then Win 98, then Win 98SE?

Thanks!
Sara