ROBERT SAYRE wrote in a message to WAYNE CHIRNSIDE:

WC> By the time I get around to a CD burner DVD burners may be 
WC> affordable?

RS> The darned things take a 600MHz or better PC plus Win98 or higher.

Do they?  Maybe they just need a machine that fast when running under m$
operating systems.  

RS> Unless things change in newer DVD burners, I'll probably never have
RS> one.

Of course they'll change.  One of the things that'll probably happen is
they'll stuff more buffer ram into them,  meaning it's less likely that
you'll have a problem in that regard.

I remember reading about how you couldn't burn a cdrom and do anything else
on the machine at the time,  or it wouldn't come out right.  This doesn't
seem to be the case under linux,  as far as I can tell.

RJT> at this point I'm content to hold off on that stuff a bit.  My one 
RJT> foray a couple of months back t look at what was out there in 
RJT> terms of new MBs and such convinced me that I wasn't ready to jump 
RJT> into that stuff just yet.

WC> You'd be more prepared if you were online, read reviews at Tom's 
WC> Hardware site, www.motherboards.org and download and read the 
WC> manuals for the new boards. They appear intimidating at first 
WC> however once you've read the manual all the strange terminology 
WC> becomes apparent and in fact is much simpler than what we're used 
WC> to.

RS> Besides money, it's all the TIME it takes to get back up to speed 
RS> on this stuff, knowing that tomorrow it'll all be different, again,
RS> that is hard to find.

Just so.

Plus,  are those reviews,  ads,  and whatever else is out there on the 'net
and in the magazines oriented toward what's out there *now*,  what's about
to come out,  or what's in the process?  I tend to buy a little behind the
bleeding edge,  gives the bugs a chance to get worked out.  But reviews for
stuff that are no longer "current" aren't going to be as easy to
find.  They'd rather push the newer product...

And I suppose it's fine if you've been reading all that stuff all along, 
and keeping track of it,  and so forth,  but like you say,  who has the
time?

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