On 12-24-97, TOM ENRIGHT declared to ROBERT PLETT:
TE> RP> Musta missed sumpin' somewhere.  When did you take the plunge fer 
ore
TE> RP> computer horsepower, and how did you avoid getting Win95 at the time?
TE>I've been doing it one piece at a time.  Building my own system
TE>is nothing new, I've done it before.  Using second-hand parts or
TE>parts that are less than leading-edge makes the whole process
TE>very inexpensive.  Right now I've got a 486DX-133, 16M ram, a 420
TE>Meg hard disk, a 20X CD-Rom, Sound Blaster 16 and my US Robotics
TE>Sportster 14.4 modem.
Nice.  Kinda tough ta do that with notebooks though, and I'm VERY
spoiled.  One can get used to computing in a recliner *real* quick.
|-)
Sure puts a damper on ideas of upgrade and expansion though.  For
example, there is *no* way I can replace the 8250 UARTs in this thing -
I've taken it apart and looked, and they're both in a surface mount VLSI
on the main board.  
TE> RP> Some of us is still strugglin' with old, slow, 386-SX type thingys.
TE> RP> Guess tha few of us left will hafta hold up DOS on our own now, eh?
TE>Check into the used market, prices are very low.  One thing under
TE>Win95 has surprised me; my DOS programs run significantly faster
TE>under Win95 than under DOS.  Blue Wave now runs like the whole
TE>thing was on a huge ram-disk.
Essentially, it most likely is - the whole thing loaded up in memory.
I've gotten similar effect simply using a well sized cache on this
little machine - like running in molasses without it.  For some things,
like running SLMR, I also use a RAM drive.  The only time I get a disk
access when doing echomail is when the files are first expanded and when
SLMR saves replies.  SLMR is considerably faster than BW is anyway, but
set up this way and running SLMR, you'd swear this was more than a lowly
20mhz 386-SX. |-)
TE>However the external editor I use
TE>with Blue Wave is acting up a little.  I need to do some fine
TE>tuning with it, or maybe it just won't work with Win95.  Only
TE>time and testing will tell.
In what way does it act up, and is the DOS that's part of your Win95 a
version 5.x?  All of them I've actually seen and played around with to
date have been.
Bob     /\-/\   - proud Ilk   homebody@galstar.com
C.A.T. ( o o ) Chapter Ilks
       == ^ ==
Green Country - Oklahoma      http://www.galstar.com/~homebody/
 * SLMR 2.1a * DOS - the understood.
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