Re: Ridin' Through Gateway Country, Roundin' up details.... (fwd)

["Adam Williams" <awilliam@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

> With the volume of data a lot of people are handling today, and with todays
> hardware, a description like that means that it just doesn't cut it for A LOT
> of apps. The market is telling me this; lots of clients have done evals of
> '95, and they've moved on to something else, NT or one of the Unices.
>

Volume of data?  Gateway sells PC's for home user.  If your talking office
desktop's I would possibly agree.  But for home PC's I have a hard time
imagining that Word Processing or your personal budget would require more than
a 486.  But then I haven't really ran M$ since the Wfwg days.  I know that I
had three X-terminals hooked to my 486DX33 w/ 16Mb RAM and three users could
use Word Perfect 7.0, MPSQL, Z-Mail, and WingZ spreadsheets at the same time
without a problem (I'm serious!).  But then Linux is WAY more efficient than
Winbloze.

> >It's been at least as reliable for me as DOS has ever been, if not more,
> >and I actually enjoy using it enough that I'll always have at least one box
> >running it.
> I'm pleased that SOMEONE has a stable install of Win95; this is one of the
> cases I've heard of. Have you ever had to solve a problem by reinstalling or
> doing extensive recovery work?
>

Stable has a lot to do with the hardware.  I had a Wfwg machine which I used
with Borland C++ and Wordstart primarily.  It ran without a problem for years!
 My roommates PC crashed and burned all the time (like weekly).  The big flaw
in M$-Winbloze is the video drivers,  cards come and go so fast,  and vendors
need to win performance comparisons, so they cheat.  Buy an ATI card, and your
systems will be much more stable.  Diamond makes the worst video drivers on the
market.  We replaced my roommates card with a ATI from some generic thing and
all his problems vanished.  It's too bad the trade rags don't include a
"durability" rating in their reviews.  These problems don't follow to Linux
because the vendors do not develope the drivers,  developer's who actually have
to live with the card do.


> Let's look at price-performance. I paid over $1.5K for the NT software I
> have, and there's a goodly amount of stuff I need to do that I just cannot
> accomplish under NT. Add to that over $4K of time (so far), to get it config-
> ured and keep it running. Professionally, I've spent about $2.5K in time to
> keep Linux running, but only about $60.00 for the software. The only thing I
> cannot do in Linux is test and compile for NT!
>
Rumor has it that BOCHs will now run NT in a vm.  If I can land myself a cheap
copy of NT,  and when I get my new drives,  I'm definitely going to give that a
try.  I hate dual booting.

> For me, Linux represent FAR better price-performance. I can do EVERYTHING I
> need in order to support a lot of work, and it's A LOT less expensive than
> NT. If THe cost (to me) of RH Linux went from $50.00 to $1500.00, I wouldn't
> care; the distribution is still a better value.
>

What else is there to say.  It's cheap, it works.



>
> >... we'll donate one to KLUG. I've got enough other things on the burner
> >that I don't want to commit to any real deadline, but I would like to (and
> >will try to) get it to you by the end of July.

Great! Maybe yours will work.

>
> >>>Anyone know anything more about DEC's acquisition by Alpha?
> >>Eh?
> >Pardon my buttery fingers. I meant to say, DEC's acquisition by Compaq. Is
> >this rumor or fact?
> Fact. Done deal.

Fact.  Compaq wants to become a Enterprise Systems supplier,  to do that they
needed UNIX.  DEC had UNIX.  Compaq now has both NT and UNIX,  and a trained
support team (from DEC) in both fields.  I think it is good for everybody.

>
> >>>I was surprised to learn the Alpha was still going at all after the big
to-do
> >>>with Intel some time ago.
> >>Eh?

DEC sued Intel if I recall correctly.  DEC and Intel settled out of court,
 Intel now has fab rights to the Alpha (why DEC did this blows my mind,  It's
like , let sue and deliberately loose).  The Alpha will continue for a few more
generations,  as it is a better chip.  It currenlty beats what the Intel Merced
will be when it finally ships.  And by then the Alpha will be even faster.  And
the DOJ is poised to file an anti-trust against Intel!  Next election I'm
voting Democrat for the first time in my life.