Yes, as long as I am out in the sticks and on a satellite connection, am not a gamer, do not do online interactive games, just read message boards, post pictures for friends and family and surf the web, why should I upgrade to a machine that just waits around for content to get down the pipe, heck, I have to wait on some places now, a faster machine will not speed me up any. My printer, scanner, network, camera interface, 5 in 1 reader. All my equipment works.
We live on social security so $$ are tight but I can have 5 computers (one dicated Linux machine, no need of ‘dual boot’ )with separate APC backup for the main ones in the house. The laptop has it’s own battery and the one in the garage is for checking out free parts I come to collect.
I have less invested than a single mid-level game machine with modern scan, print super dupper video card, etc.
To each his own.
Back to my speed and CPU question.
Okay, this is really strange.
In my machine right now, I have a 80 Gig WD (7200 RPM) hard drive partitioned to 40 Gigs as my main with my CD burner as slave. On IDE ‘the second’ I have a ‘CD player’ as slave and the hard drive as master.
This works fine with WD, Samsung, Maxtor and Seagate, IBM and a few strange little HD’s I have laying around or with stuff stored on them.
It will fuss about any of my Linux hard drives, it knows they are there is about all. This all seems normal to me.
Now, My Seagate (120Gig) { partitioned to 40 Gigs} (7200 RPM) and 80 Gig WD ( resized to 40 for speed)(7200RPM) are the two I use for main drives and mirror drives. (about a weekly schedule of mirror and swapping) and all that works fine.
The SO’s main WD 20 Gig (5400 RPM) {This hard drive works good in my 'IDE the second} and 120 Gig Seagate not resized, just a full 120 Gig (7200 RPM) { This Seagate will not even show in my ‘IDE the second’ }‘Windows Explorer’ or ‘Belarc’, but does on the boot up. It get it’s lights showing power etc.
My mirror utility, (on a floppy which boots during a cold start ) can see and work with it. 
But I can’t see it to defrag or scan the way I normally do it, which is the only way to compare ‘apples’ to ‘apples’. Actual defragging and scanning is not the problem remember, it is the speed of operation between the two machines that is puzzling me and the cause of all the questions. What is the deal with her machine?
That different BIOS,
The different L2 cache,
A bad Mother Board???
My little 400 Mz CPU with 300+ RAM out in the garage defrags and scans and mirrors faster than the SO’s… ???
It (the garage one) does have the same BIOS I have on my machine… ???
My machine has seen 120 Gig HD’s before just fine. … ???
I normally keep whichever is the back up hard drive for that week physically disconnected from the machine.
I will often have a little 10 Gig or less on my ‘IDE the second’ if I feel the need to have something there or some purpose.
Anyone have any ideas??
Here is the 'right now ‘Belarc’ readouts.
Here is SOs’:
Windows 98 SE (build 4.10.2222)
VIA Technologies, Inc. VT8363
Processor a
850 megahertz AMD Duron
128 kilobyte primary memory cache
64 kilobyte secondary memory cache
Main Circuit Board
Board: 8363-686A
Bus Clock: 100 megahertz
BIOS: Award Software International, Inc. 6.00 PG 11/29/2000
Drives
120.00 Gigabytes Usable Hard Drive Capacity
111.30 Gigabytes Hard Drive Free Space
Memory Modules c,d
CD-ROM Drive/F5E
Generic floppy disk drive (3.5")
ST3120026A [Hard drive] (120.03 GB) – drive 0, s/n 5JT5LFZJ, rev 8.01, SMART Status: Healthy 512 Megabytes Installed Memory
Memory Modules
Slot ‘BANK_0’ has 256 MB
Slot ‘BANK_1’ has 256 MB
Slot ‘BANK_2’ is Empty
Slot ‘BANK_3’ is Empty
Local Drive Volumes
c: (on drive 0) 120.00 GB 111.30 GB free
Here is Mine:
Operating System System Model
Windows 98 SE (build 4.10.2222) No details available
Processor a
600 megahertz AMD Athlon
128 kilobyte primary memory cache
512 kilobyte secondary memory cache
Main board: AMD-75X-W977
Bus Clock: 100 megahertz
BIOS: Award Software International, Inc. 4.51 PG 10/01/99
Drives
80.02 Gigabytes Usable Hard Drive Capacity
65.01 Gigabytes Hard Drive Free Space
ATAPI-CD ROM DRIVE-50MAX [CD-ROM drive]
YAMAHA CRW8424E [CD-ROM drive]
Generic floppy disk drive (3.5")
Generic floppy disk drive (3.5")
Generic IDE hard disk drive (40.01 GB) – drive 1
Generic STORAGE DEVICE [Hard drive] – drive 255
WDC WD400LB-00DNA0 (40.02 GB) [Hard drive] – drive 0 640 Megabytes Installed Memory
Memory Modules
Slot ‘0’ has 256 MB
Slot ‘1’ has 256 MB
Slot ‘2’ has 128 MB
Local Drive Volumes
c: (on drive 0) 40.01 GB 25.01 GB free
d: (on drive 1) 40.01 GB 40.00 GB free