video card

[Neil]

On Tue, Apr 1, 2008 at 10:00 AM, Art Baur <chivo at myclearwave.net> wrote:
>
>
> My desk top has a Nvidia Vanta/ Vanta card and I want to switch it over to
> something better and Ubuntu friendly(still running XP). I want a better
> image and something were I don't have to bash my brains out to install. My
> lap top took me 4 day to resolve. Okay I'm sloooooow. Last question I'm also
> installing a new 300 gig Harddrive will ubuntu recognize all the gig? Comp
> is a Compaq and for my motherboard have no idea. Pentium 3 at 1600. All
> ideas welcome.
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All but maybe the newest Nvidea or Radeon cards are supported. Nvidea
and Radeon offer proprietary drivers on their sites (download section,
choose card, choose Linux I believe), but you shouldn't need them.

Did you try to install Ubuntu on the laptop (I'll assume that)?
What took so long?
- The graphics card (symptoms: only low resolutions allowed or
crashing at the first signs of something else as the text)?
- The lack of cdrom drive (some old laptops have that problem)?
- To little memory (the normal installer seems to demand 300 megs)?

What kind of laptop is it? What is in it (CPU, graphics card, motherboard ) ?
Answers to these questions would help in defining where the problems
of your laptop install is, and therefore whether you might encounter
them on the upgrading of your desktop PC.

The hard drive question: The hard drive will be recognised. It will be
possible to use the full 300 GB.

However: it may not be possible to boot from it.
I do not know your motherboard, and I do know there were some
motherboards with biosses that could only adres 128 GiB. I do not know
exactly when this was (might be way before the 1600 MHz PIII) and I do
not know if this really matters, but it is worth noting.

If you are only planning to add the drive and not use it as boot
device there will be no problem.
<extra info>
Windoze uses the information provided by the bios to determine what
the specs of the harddisks, and will not be able to see the extra
space if the bios doesn't see it. Linux checks the harddisks by itself
and will see the space if the bios doesn't. This has an disadvantage:
the startup time is a bit bigger, because Linux has to perform an
extra check
However, Linux is build to be eternal (close to it) so you do not have
to reboot often. It also has an advantage, because Linux can detect
drives whether the Bios detects them or not. This is especially
usefull in old servers with large harddisks.
</extra info>

Neil
-- 
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