On 1 Oct 2000, at 8:59, Tom L. McCoy wrote: > Well, I got the drive. It's a laptop drive. I feel like an idiot.. > Anyway, it's an IDE, and I found on eBay an adapter that will > match the 44pin plug to a 40, but it was already sold. So I > sent the guy an email to ask if he could refer me to a source. > The adapter kit includes mounting rails for a pc, it went for > $5.95 + S&H (or thereabouts..) I've got $20- tied up in this > project (so far) and for another $10 it's worth it to me to have > double the storage I have now (1.5g to 3.0g). I'm not real clear > on why I should multi-partition my C drive and the new drive.. The way most formats use the disk are to break it up into little bits, called sectors. With FAT16 one is limited to 65536 sectors on a disk. So for a 1.5GB disk, each sector is at least 24756 bytes (which you must round up to 32k) [recall 1k = 1024 bytes] If you create a 1 byte file, it uses the enitre 32k sector, which cannot be used for anything else. Any file size under 32k will actually use 32k; anything between 32k and 64k will actually use 64k; etc. So if you have a large number of small files in a large partition you get a lot of wastage. (FAT32 increased the maximum number of sectors, so a 20GB FAT32 isn't as much as a problem. AFAIK FAT16 is limited to 4GB partitions) > I also have a 486 (8m) that is running dos5, I would like to upgrade > it to 32m and install a 56k modem and dos software that'll allow me > isp access. It is my understanding that finding a modem that's not > Win plug-n-play is difficult and/or expensive. Is this correct? Also, I If it's an external modem it should work with any OS. (Given that its a serial modem; I've heard of some USB models) AFAICT all PCI modems are Winmodems. Some ISA are and others not. (My old 2400bps wasn't ;-) And real modems are more expensive than their lighter siblings. They have more hardware in them (they do things like error- correction and data compression themselves instead of making software do it). How are you using the internet now? You may be able to network your two computers and use some form of internet connection sharing. But this might be getting a little advanced. ;-) > installed and played around with Arachne software a while back and > found it to be difficult, can someone recommend a dos-based browser > and/or mail reader that's simple and reliable? AFAIK Arachne would be the easiest DOS internet suite to get working. There are others around, but I haven't much experience with them. If you look at http://www.fdisk.com/doslynx/ you might get some ideas. HTH -- Ben Hood, Arachne Fan Club Webmaster http://arachne.virtualave.net To unsubscribe from SURVPC send a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with unsubscribe SURVPC in the body of the message. Also, trim this footer from any quoted replies. More info can be found at; http://www.softcon.com/archives/SURVPC.html
