I remember a while ago that people were posting details of their current computers. I didn't do so because I knew that I would be updating my machine in the near future. So here are the details:

=================================================================== Antec SX1240 full tower case.

Good quality case with some nifty features such as being able to open the side of the case using a handle. One disadvantage is that there are so many cooling holes and slots the new machine is now more noisy than the old one. Hard drive noise mostly.

Tyan Thunder K7 mainboard.

2 x 1.3 GHz athlon processors, 2 x LAN sockets, 512 MB ram, Winbond hardware monitoring, ATI Rage graphics chip. =====================================================================

Into this go my Adaptec 2940AU SCSI adapter, 3 x IBM SCSI hard drives together with the SCSI Tape Streamer, SCSI CD Writer, SoundBlaster and Matrox graphics card all from my old machine (not using the onboard graphics chip - only 4MB memory).

Unfortunately I could not include my trusty old ISA 56k modem because the new board is PCI only and I don't like external modems - too untidy. So what does clever clogs do? He buys a PCMCIA to PCI adapter that will take an existing PCMCIA modem after researching that such a combination will work only to find that, although it does work, the maximum data transfer rate is 1.6k!!!

The manufacturers of the adapter, Elan Digital Systems in Britain, tell that it won't work properly on my board without a BIOS or kernel modification because the bridge chip on the card is not being assigned a PCI interrupt. I'm just repeating what I've been told as it's way over my head anyway.

I have emailed Tyan to ask if such modifications are likely to be made in the near future and am waiting for an answer.

Does anyone know of a PCI modem that will be guaranteed to work with Debian Potato? As they are cheap it might do as a short term solution.

I also replaced my dead UPS with a new Belkin UPS and Belkin provide Linux monitoring software. Good for them!

The new setup has been running only a few days but during installation and testing I've had to reboot several times and occasionally after KDE(1) has started I've noticed that whatever was displayed when it was last closed down is opened twice. So I have two of everything. It does not happen every time and it didn't happen on the old machine.

Still using the same hard drives and operating system!

Oh! One minor problem. I cannot get any sound from the speaker when dialling. 'cardctl config' tells me that the speaker is enabled and the volume in kppp is set to medium. Any ideas on that? Maybe it's this lack of a PCI interrupt that's causing this.

So there it is. A fast machine with what is effectively a 16k modem.

Bah Humbug!

Barry Samuels