I am pleased to say that I seem to have solved the problems I reported.
I changed some nonobvious settings in bios and was able to get the
machine to boot from floppy (though I am not sure why the changes I made
were necessary). I then did an upgrade to Mandrake 6.1 and, lo and
behold, now my machine loads up Linux at lightning speed (as it should).
Again I am not sure why the improvement but all seems normal. Now I will
just wait and hope the freezing problems are gone as well!
Regards,
Eric Mings Ph.D.
