Bringing the Duron forward

Last Updated on September 30, 2010 by Dave Farquhar

And my Duron is alive. Right now it’s an all-SCSI system, with a Plextor UltraPlex 40max and a 4.3 GB Seagate Medalist SCSI HD. It smokes. Any time I can turn on Show Window Contents While Dragging and play back full-motion video in Media Player while violently moving the window around the screen and the playback remains smooth, I’m impressed.
The floppy drives don’t work right because I somehow managed to mangle the cable, but I’ll replace it. One of these days. I’ve got a few spare floppy cables hanging around somewhere.

It’s running Windows 2000. I wanted a fast, reliable office suite, so I installed Office 95. Yes, five. It’s nice, stays out of my way, loads really fast, doesn’t crash much, and has some semblence of an idea of distinction between an OS and an application.

I dual-booted it with Mandrake 7.2 (I haven’t downloaded 8 yet). It’s nice. It’s quick. I made this post from Konqueror under Mandrake 7.2.

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3 thoughts on “Bringing the Duron forward

  • June 2, 2001 at 11:26 pm
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    Interesting about Office 95 on W2K, I ignorantly loaded Office 97 on W2K and immediately suffered rather frequent random reboots – my son pointed out the obvious, that it wasn’t on the compatability list. So like MS not to support their own. Interesting site, new to me via daynotes.com.

  • June 3, 2001 at 5:32 pm
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    Trust me.

    I know that Mandrake 7.2 is nice, but Mandrake 8 is far, far better. The whole KDe is updated, you get a far better Gnome setup… lots of improvements.

    Or, if you don’t want something as cutting-edge, you can use Red Hat 7.1. Stable as anything, and the distribution that Red hat 7 should have been.

  • June 3, 2001 at 9:32 pm
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    Hmm, I’ve never had problems with Office 97 on W2K. Of course MS wants you to buy Office 2000, or now, Office XP. I heard rumors that Win95 threw a monkey wrench in when you launched Office 4.2 under it (MS wanted to sell Office 95), but I never had much trouble with Word 6 under Windows 95. If you’re having problems with reboots, I’d be checking device drivers.

    As for Linux, I don’t doubt Mandrake 8 is a lot better. I just haven’t gotten my CD burner going yet, but I’m sure I will.

    BTW, I’ve heard people say Mandrake doesn’t support Adaptec SCSI cards out of the box, but Mandrake 7.2 had no problems with my 2940UW.

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