Re: [WinMac] OrangePC Blues....

caerwyn(caerwyn[at]bigfoot.com)
Mon, 30 Nov 1998 07:54:55 +0100

Brian Durant said:

>Hi guys,
>
>Sorry to butt in on your thread like this, but I picked up on your e-mails
>because I have
>just ordered an OrangeMicro 660 PC card with an AMD 350 Mhz. processor and
>max RAM (150 MB??) Will I experience the same problems as you describe???
>
>Brian

No worries for butting in. The answer is who knows what problems you'll
have...

Since I first posted I discovered that there was an update to the
software OrangePC 3.2.
I installed it over my first install and lo and behold I could no longer
boot of my C: drive. Bloody wonderful. I ended up completely reinstalling
Windows and then updating it again. Don't know what happened, I thought I
followed the well documented instructions. However, having got 3.2
installed it does seem substantially more stable. So that's good news.

I suspect how good a run you get for your money depends on a number of
factors. What Mac you have, what extensions and software you run, which
OS.

All in all, I've only read good things about OrangePC cards and I was
surprised to have such a headache. I put it down in part to using the
latest machine, the latest OS, and a few new versions of utilities. I
should also add that I had a version of Windows so I bought their
software without Windows, which means I had to do all the installation by
hand. If you buy EasyInstall with Windows then when you build the disk
image, I believe it just copies across a ready made Windows system disk
so there's not have the setup problems. That's just what I've been told
by tech support, I haven't tried it. If you're a lay user and don't want
the hassle of working out how to format the disk in DOS, and then raw
install Windows then buy it all inclusive.

I'm a little dispointed that the IDE ZIP drive isn't supported but I'm
assured they are working on it. All in all if you want one machine on
your desk then it's probably worth the hassle and it'll probably be okay.
I wanted one keyboard, one screen and I couldn't find a good switching
solution. Maybe I should have persevered with the search. I'm running an
AMD 300MHz, and it's definitely not as nippy as a 300 should be. I put it
down to the disk mostly, I seem to get a lot of thrashing going on. I
used to get it on my real PC too, I guess it's the VM. But when you're
running from a disk image on a shared disk anything that thrashes the
disk is really bad news.

S'all I think, let me know how you get on. Either via MacWin or directly.

Cheers

Caerwyn

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This archive was generated by hypermail 2.0b2 on Sun Nov 29 1998 - 22:58:05 PST