My five-year-old Gateway Pentium 200 MHz died recently. (It won't boot from the hard drive or a rescue disk, and it won't go into bios-setup mode.) I don't think it's fixable, and anyway, it was so slow that it's probably time to replace it. Temporarily I'm using a borrowed computer with Win95. Yuck!
For my next computer I want to make sure that everything is compatible with Linux. I searched this list and found a few posts about buying computers. They were a little old (one or two years), so I'm wondering if the situation has changed. A few people recommended the AMD Athlon processor over Pentiums. And Matrox for video, Soundblaster or Ensoniq for sound. Any thoughts on this? I've heard that computers nowadays are built with the cheapest possible components, so I was wondering if building it myself would be a good idea. It might not be much cheaper than buying one from Dell or Gateway, but if the result was a better quality machine it might be worthwhile. So far I've only had to replace broken components in my Gateway, such as the hard drive and CDrom, also added memory. Building a computer would be a challenge, but I think I'd enjoy doing it... Peter Christensen -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
