From: Chris Robinson 

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?

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.

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.

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).

That's it for now,
Chris.

--- BBBS/NT v4.01 Flag-4