you could have it set to mdma0 and say yes! I do have DMA on Besides the fact you've already been caught out by using inferior hardware on the linux side of the test. It's NOT inferior enough to explain the huge speed differences. Actually, the pio and dma mode have not only make huge differences in performance, but it can creately effect cpu load when accessing the device as well. Cheers, Greg

I'm curious about the outcome of some large-scale Linux installs, especially the details of moving from MS Office to OpenOffice.  I haven't read any horror or success stories, yet. You'll find one of my faults is that I have excellent retention and comprehension for things I read, but rarely bother to remember where I read it, unless it was in print, in hand.  Along those lines, I have read about success.  Which, I honestly don't find surprising in the least.  The caveat here is, I doubt they had complex documents to begin with. Translated, I doubt they burried themselves in every MS feature they could find.  That means, little to no macros, VB _script_ing, etc.  Sure, you can do a lot (all?) of that stuff in OO too, but why.  Seriously, most people just need a nice, clean document.  Nothing fancy.  Just business letters, memos, and various tidbits.  Things are mail merges/sorts are as easy as pie, in both cases. Sucess or failure of these projects are really going to hang on planning and expectations which are set before the project even begins.  If people expect OO to be a 100% compatible replacement, in every way, requiring no changes, clearly it's going to be a horror story.  If they are realistic and their document inventory fits a typical document, then there is plenty of room for success. Lastly, I should offer, that in the ones that I can remember some detail, one or more PC's were left running Windows such that a document which OO didn't like much, could still be easily converted (RTF, etc).  So, clearly a saftey chute is planned for.  Which, seems pretty reasonable to me.  In fact, I do the same thing here.  My office is OO, but I keep Office 97 and 2000 around, just in case.  And, I do have to use it from time to time, but far less since 1.1 came out. Cheers, Greg

OO absolutely destroyed the fairly complex Word2000 document I threw at it. It was unusable in OO. In your case, it sounds like Word recognizes the stench of OO and sprays Lysol on it.  What else would you expect?  You don't actually think MS should make their file formats open, to make it easier for people to use other products?  Besides, Word 2000 saves to about 10 other document formats - but not OpenOffice of course. Oh no no no! I expected Clippy to tell the truth and admit microshaft had sabotaged the word format because big $ could be gained by forcing users to upgrade at the expense of compatibility between different word formats. Its been left to OO to bridge the divides created by these inefficient policies created by convicted monopolies and its OO that allows big corporations to maintain their lines of communications by using the the features not available for monies charged by M$ for their inferior products with limited compatibility.

Does the asterisk mean yours is set at Ultra DMA mode 2? Yes, it's an old machine.