-=> CHARLES ANGELICH wrote to WAYNE CHIRNSIDE <=-
 
 WC> Well the 486 bit the dust so I transfered the drives to the
 WC> Pentium and am up and running lacking only a CMOS battery.

 CA> Always sad to lose 'an old friend'. I miss my old XT and
 CA> greenscreen at times which is why my QEDIT uses green on black
 CA> displays (to comfort me in my grief). :-)

 CA> The upside is that it is often interesting to see familiar
 CA> software zooming along on faster hardware. Takes some getting
 CA> used to (for me).

 Well loading software is still limited by the antique 
 Seagate drive.
 On the upside I've found the 40X CD-ROM is operational and I've set 
 it up on IDE 1 so it's not slaved to IDE 0 limiting the speed
 of my new drive when I obtain it.
 Looks like by tomorrow sometime I should be able to slap the
 Sound card in and have precisely the same operability 
 that I had before. My Old Creative CD-ROM was 2X.

 CA> btw: I remembered to try www.dell.com using Netscape v4.08 here
 CA> and it does load the homepage. I didn't 'look around' though.
 CA> Often these graphics intensive websites will load their webpage
 CA> but then get REALLY fancy if you try to use any other pages and
 CA> _that_ will crash my browser. :-\

 I've radically increased my cache RAM and disk cache but still
 opening several pages on Tom's Hardware site will provoke a crash.
 
 CA> Funny in a way, that those who attempt to sell new hardware use
 CA> websites that older legacy systems can't access or not for long
 CA> enough to find anything. They only want to sell to the 'elite'
 CA> I guess?

It's getting so the peripherals being sold new are almost
entirely dependent on cutting edge equipment :-(
A new hard drive will soon go into this machine and 
that and perhaps a new I/O card supporting higher tranfer
rates should make a significant difference in system performance.
This system _will_ take a faster processor but I *can't*
get to the underside of the board where the boards model number
is to research it as this would mean tearing down
the entire system something I'm unwilling to do with no backup :-(
I can gain marginally increased performance, double the speed,
using information on a sticker on the inside of the case.
When I get a backup system I shall tear it all the way
down and get that model number and do a google search.
Unfortunately all my work configuring X-Windows for the
other video chip set just flew out the Window and I don't yet
know if the old Slackware release I've loaded on hda4 will
detect it, doubtful so I'll just format and upgrade to 8.1.
Only secured the CD with one screw so I can move it forward
when I go out Monday to purchase a new CMOS battery.
Come March it's a definate I'll have a new 60 gig drive
in this very machine.
Another neato thing is this machine's BIOS has a CD-boot
option however what's not so good is I've not been able to 
find a driver for the ATI video card for Win 3.1 as there
doesn't appear to be one :-(
So I've actually less graphics capability than when it was 
on the 486. In Linux should I get X-Win running in March
on the new drive I'll install a complete Linux 8.1
Sad too is the fact the PCI software modem doesn't have  
a DOS or Win 3.1 driver but it DOES have a Linux driver :-)
Only one thing remains of the original Packard Bell
in this "Dempsy Dumpster" PC and that's the SoundBlaster
sound card that I shall hookup to the CD-ROM tomorrow.
This machine has room for three hard drives in addition to the
CD-ROM bay. Basic Linux correctly ID'ed the 40X CD-ROM.
This machine should successfully deal with MP3's
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