From: "Adam Flinton" 


"Chris Robinson"  wrote in
message news:3E806149.435E1B80{at}NOSPAMtotalise.co.uk...
> I've done a few things since my last post on this so I thought I'd
> better update.  One of the main things I did was get a (partly) new PC.
> I got a new Motherboard, CPU (P4, 2.4Ghz) and RAM (512Mb PC2700).  I'm
> slowly upgrading (new hard drive next!).
>
> 1. So when did they change AGP?
> On popping in my new MoBo and bits I realised that my AGP card didn't
> fit in the AGP port.  I knew AGP had gone through various versions but I
> didn't realise they'd changed the actual port the cards plug into.
> Well, they did, so I've borrowed a graphics card (32Mb Matrox Millenium
> G400) out of our Proxy (it doesn't really need anything much so it's got
> a 4Mb SIS PCI card in for the mo).  My original card was a TNT 1 so I
> guess it must've changed around a year or so after this card was
> released?
>

Dunno what pissed me off was the change to IDE drives...I now have 2 boxes
loaded to the max with "older" drives which wouldn't go into my
newer box. Then again......it meant & had to chuck both of the big new
drives into the new (madrake 9.1) box so....but it taught me a nasty lesson
in caveat emptor.

> 2. Booting Linux (Mandrake 9) after the upgrade.
> Nice!  I installed all the new bits into my case, plugged everything
> back in and booted Linux.  Madrake saw the new graphics card, asked me
> if I'd like to configure it (which I did) and then then booted fine
> (which was nice).  I could see this being a really useful feature on
> servers.  Imagine buying a brand new server and (so long as it's the
> same architecture like x86 for example) and just copying the hard drive
> data across and booting up - that'd be damn useful for many companies
> I'd imagine and IMHO should be something you'd include in the TCO for
> Windows (NT-based anyway) vs Linux.
>

I took a box apart & shoved in a Vid/TV card, 10/100 netcard & a
different sound card....couple of clicks on reboot & alles ist in
ordnung.


> 3. Upgrading Mandrake.
> I downloaded the RC2 of Mandrake 9.1 and installed it (no probs) and I'm
> really liking KDE 3.1.  It's very usable.  I've only been running it
> since the weekend but the main things I like so far are:
> - The GUI.  It's just so nice!
> - The right-click, burn to CD option.  The CD writing s/w that comes
> with it is KIII I *think* (I can't remember the name atm) and it's as
> easy to use, if not easier, than Nero which is a very big plus point for
> me.
>

I'm using it & so far so good.

> 4. Speed issues.
> Before I put 9.1 RC2 on my new box, I ran an upgrade on my old one
> (PII{at}398Mhz, 512Mb RAM, 16Mb RivaTNT) and it was hella slow
> (desktop-wise) which I'm guessing is because of the new versions of KDE
> and Gnome.  Even after the upgrade, I kinda expected my PC to seam a lot
> quicker than it was.  For the moment I'm going to blame this on my Hard
> Drive as it's my original 8Gb, ATA-33 drive that can probably only
> manage 8Mb/sec read/write on the disk so I'm hoping that when I get a
> new HDD (possibly the Maxtor 80Gb ATA-133 with the 8Mb cache) that this
> will improve speed dramatically (I think the hard drive is the main
> bottleneck in my system atm).
>

I found KDE3.1 noticeably faster ditto gnome2.2. The app which has really
impressed me wrt to getting much faster is Moz 1.3

Adam

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