On the 20/06/96  19:51, Bob waffled to Dieter..

 Hello Bob,

 DM> Ordinary IDE card should do fine.
 
 BL> I need the one for four drives so I can run the CD separately.
 BL> I thought I needed a VLB card for that.
 
 DM> Not necessarily, although the bulk of the 4-HDD controllers
 DM> seem to be VLB based.

 BL> Oh? That's where we were at cross-purposes. I thought 4-HDD equated
 BL> to VLB.

 No. I said it seemed to be the bulk of 4xHDD controllers are VLB
 based these days, although it is not necessarily so. As BillG
 said you can get all the HDD functions, as well as Serial comms,
 ect, on a VLB card for $25. The price difference between VLB
 and ISA is pretty minimal, and for the purported increase in HDD
 data transfer across the VLB bus, it would be money well spent.
 
 DM> I'm basically in the same boat as you, viz the CD ROM drive.
 DM> Currently I've been using a yum-cha audio card, with the audio
 DM> bits disabled, to access the CD ROM. But it seems to conflict
 DM> occasionally with OS/2 and perhaps the MediaVision PAS card,
 DM> leaving the system unstable.

 BL> Yair... that's what I thought, and I've got an internal modem too,

 Sounds painful... did you not watch where you sat one evening ?

 BL> to make the interrupts even more crowded. It makes more sense to run
 BL> it off the BIOS like a hard drive.

 HDD's also use interrupts.
 
 BL> Now I'm confused again. Brenton said LBA only comes into effect
 BL> over 1024 heads.
 
 DM> Sectors :-)

 BL> Why does sects always raise its ugly head? And sectors to you too!
 BL> You prevert. And anyway... it's cylinders.
 
 Oh, aww right then, have it your way.

 BL> Can't I enable LBA for the big drive but access the small one
 BL> non-LBA? I back up to the small drive.
 
 DM> Yes, you can do that - LBA is implemented on a per-drive basis
 
 DM> Some of the newer BIOS's also sport a setting called LARGe, in
 DM> addition to LBA and standard modes.

 BL> Mine does that! I thought it was just another way of saying LBA. It
 BL> seems to be clever about it too. It gives a LARGe alternative for my
 BL> 500Mb drive, but not the 250Mb one which does not support LBA. I can 
 BL> have 1050 cylinders and 16 heads, or 525 cylinders and 32 heads. My
 BL> BIOS gives good head, and 63 sectors per track.

 BL> A sector is less than a furlong, I think, depending on the state of
 BL> the track and whether or not the the false rail out, which is similar
 BL> to false teeth except it needs a larger glass and is longer.

 And takes longer to brush.

 BL> Apprentices get a 3 kilo allowance and mares get 3 kilos when they
 BL> come on season in November, otherwise the entires catch them. I can't
 BL> imagine why they call stallions entires, probably something to do with
 BL> testicles.

 Or hormone content.

 BL> I just thought I'd throw that in to show you how much I know about
 BL> computers.

 As much as anyone else. It's all horse manure anyway.
 
 DM> I have no idea if this is an alternative method of accessing
 DM> the entire HDD space. Maybe Rod would know.

 BL> I have no idea about anything much to do with computers. I think
 BL> mine is a gelding.
 
 It's knackered anyway.

 DM> Win95 and it's apps are messy. They don't install on the the
 DM> "data" partition properly, preferring to dump all their DLL's
 DM> etc into the Win95 partition, which I had made only 125megs
 DM> large, and now I have only 5 megs left, and that was after I
 DM> shifted about 20megs of help files.

 BL> Win31 is the same. Everything ends up in the windows/system
 BL> directory. 120 Megs!!! The penny just dropped. Win95 takes 120Mb? No
 BL> wonder they make 2Gb drives.
 
 Win95 itself was only 65megs, and I thought, naively it seems,
 that double that should be adequate. I was wrong. Duh.
 
 DM> Give the partition at least 200 megs, to be safe.

 BL> I might leave Win95 at Harvey Norman, and be *really* safe.
 
 To err in on the side of extreme caution, put all the packages
 in condoms, that way you wont ever get fucked over.

 BL> It's silly. When I bought AutoCad it was $5,000 and huge... 2
 BL> Mb!
 
 DM> Only a utility would be that small these days. The price of
 DM> progress is 25cents per meg.

 BL> I've gone on about this before. The real cost in $ per annum. I paid
 BL> $350 for a 540Mb drive 15 months ago and now I need 1.6Gb for $400.

 2 gig now, for $400.00

 BL> Allowing $100 for the old drive it's $6 a week; not 25c a meg.

 Less than $6.00 now :-)

 What else gives good head and costs less than $6.00 per week :-)

 Dieter
 

... Parliament is like a cactus except the pricks are inside.
___ Blue Wave/QWK v2.12
@EOT:

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