Dear Listonians:

Lance has a P5-120 from Gateway, circa mid-1995.  He's pumped
the RAM up to 48 megs, and he's added a BusLogic 958, a
Seagate Barracuda, and an Archive PYTHON DAT drive.

But Lance has discovered computer graphics.  I mean he's
*really* discovered them -- big time.  Now, realizes he needs raw
processing speed, and a motherboard that can cache more than the
measly 64 megs his Aladdin can handle.  :(

Lance is torn between the MMX OverDrive Processor, which
seems like a nice price, but would only take him up to 180mhz.,
and a new mb, with its unknown intricacies of size and
compatibility issues.  (He doesn't really know which boards will
fit in his full tower, and which won't.)  Advice he has gotten here
in Japan has been spotty:  "You can't use EIDE with MMX."  :(
(Really!  They said that!)

Lance has a grand, plus.  Probably not enough to get a new
box, but hopefully enough to refurbish the one he has and give
it a few more years of life.  He knows he needs a new video
card, too, because his ATI Mach64 (2 megs) ain't cuttin' it anymore.

Please help Lance.  He needs to understand the issues, and the
options.  He wants to avoid buying a fast board and a hot chip,
for example, and then finding out his bus speed is a bottleneck
that he can't get around.

What should Lance do?

Sincerely,

Lance Cummings (who runs 4 OSes on his pathetic old box, and is
*not* a hardware person at all)  :(


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