[plug] need to upgrade? -was Re: [plug] kmail and the gigasecond bug

[Bret Busby]

Bill Kenworthy wrote:

> A full Mandrake (7.2 & now 8.0) install works fine on a cyrix 686/pr233
> (200mhz) chip.  As Mandrake uses a 586 optimized compile as standard, I
> presume the cyrix uses a 586 instruction set, but a 486 physical
> architecture, which is where the pentium gets ahead.
> 
> BillK
> 
> On Sun, 2001-09-09 at 22:50, Bret Busby wrote:
> 
>>The 586 was supposed to be the equivalent of a 486; the 6x86 was supposed to be
>>the equivalent of a pentium. However, I have subsequently found that, while the
>>6x86 is supposed to be the equivalent of a pentium in processing power, it uses
>>only the 486 instruction set.
>>
>>
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 

Sorry - error in the above.

In the text "The 586 was supposed to be the equivalent of a 486", "586" 
should have been "5x86".

And, from what I understand, the 6x86 uses th4 486 instruction set; I am 
not sure about its architecture. My chip is supposed to have been the 
equivalent of a pentium 150+, but was benchmarked by software here, as 
being the equivalent of a pentium 75 to 90.

Anyway, as can be seen from the full header of this message, I now have 
to use Netscape 6.1, which is as slow as a dog without legs, and, I 
assume, like trying to run win2k on this computer; so, I would not like 
to try a version of Linux that is any more resource demanding, as I do 
not know how long my hard drive is going to last, with all the thrashing 
caused by netscape, and, reading emails takes about 5-10 times as long. 
Netscape is too big and resource demanding, and, I would rather not have 
an operating system that is similar. I could run Star Office and 
Netscape 4.61, without the system hanging, but Netscape 6.1 appears 
bigger than both of those and kmail and gvim, combined. This is the 
sixth attempt at this reply; Netscape appeared to selet half of 
everything above my reply, when I tried to delete things like the blank 
lines above. I had to stop using kmail yesterday, as it just got too 
buggy. So much for KDE.

So, yes, Bill, I have had to upgrade, and, the time cost is enormous. We 
are not rich enough to gou out and buy a new computer evbery couple of 
years, so, I guess that I am stuck with software that gets increasingly 
slow and cumbersome.

Such is progress, I suppose.
:(

Bret Busby
..........