two steps forward one step back

[Gregory Nowak]

Hi Chuck,

Owch, and congrads on your new system.
Unfortunately, as someone once put it recently,
the isa bus and the serial port are going the way of the Univac.
Having said that, if you're willing to spend some extra money,
I would see if there is an equivalent SCSI card for your scanner that will fit into the pci bus.

As for running DOS, why don't you run dosemu instead?
Greg


On Tue, Dec 11, 2001 at 09:45:25AM -0500, Charles Hallenbeck wrote:
> I am recovering from a catastrophic failure here, caused by an
> accumulation of cat hair in my fans and a runaway heating problem. I lost
> a power supply, a processor, and a motherboard. On the theory that every
> catastrophe is just a disguised opportunity, I upgraded my hardware rather
> than simply replacing it. I am now running an AMD Athlon processor at 1400
> MHz with 256 MB ram instead of the 600 MHz Athlon with 64 MB ram I was
> previously using.
> 
> That is the good news.
> 
> The bad news is - while the old motherboard had an ISA slot, the new one
> does not. And while the old system ran DOS on a small partition, the new
> system will not run DOS. Attempting to run DOS causes the loader to switch
> to rerunning Linux, but when that happens Linux hangs up when about 90%
> through the boot process with no speech, no keyboard control, and no error
> messages left on the screen.
> 
> The reason I have preserved a DOS partiti9on is to support two legacy apps
> I have relied on. One is the Arkenstone Openbook software which runs under
> Windows 3.11. The ISA slot on the old system supported a scanner interface
> card for this ancient Scanjet Plus flat bed scanner, so without that card
> and without DOS/Win3.11, I guess I kiss Arkenstone goodbye.
> 
> The other legacy app is an old DOS version of "CheckFree" with which I pay
> my bills electronically. So I guess I kiss my bill paying goodbye.
> 
> I will probably move the Scanjet card and Arke;nstone software to an old
> 486SX which will also run the CheckFree program too, so all is not as
> bleak as I made out. However, it seems too bad to ask a 486SX to do OCR
> when a perfectly good Athlon XP 1600+ is spinning its wheels on email and
> web browsing trivia.
> 
> The only thing I can think to do is collar someone to help me sort through
> the menus of the CMOS setup program on my new system to see if there are
> some settings that might sabotage my DOS. If anyone knows what I might
> look for on the setup menus I would appreciate some suggestions.
> 
> Ain't computers fun?
> 
> Chuck
> 
> 
> Visit me at http://www.mhonline.net/~chuckh
> The Moon is Waning Crescent (12% of Full)
> 
> 
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