Per the LAN Peer-To-Peer issue;
I had no problems bringing my New Win 7 OS Machine on to our existing 100BT Ethernet LAN, consisting of several Machines using Win XP OS (currently SP 3.xxx, or whatever the SP build was in March or April!).
One Machine on our LAN is quite "Mature"... The Disk Drives are IDE (actually, they are ATA...); the Processor is an AMD equivalent of a Pentium III (Not a Celeron, though!!!), and it uses PC 133 DRAM!
It's still using an older XP version - something like SP 2.5, or so.
Nevertheless, File Transfer / sharing, LAN Printing (and even One directly PC connected "Shared Printer"), as well as Internet / E-mail access through our ADSL Gateway, are all working properly between Machines with XP and W7 Operating Systems.
Workstation Setup was somewhat painless with the W7 Machine, it just took some time for me to comprehend the new terminology of the W7 Connectoid scheme, vs what I have grown use to for 10 Years in XP.
Compared to the days before Plug & Play, or for Greg; MCA, I really cannot complain too much... Not that setting hardware jumpers was all that difficult, the frustration came when POST/Bootstrap (IRQ80, or so) let you know of an Address conflict - which, for some reason you know that "03BCh" is available, you intend on setting the Jumpers for that Address, but instead you set them for "0278h" and upset either your Sound Card, or the Dual EPP/ECP Parallel Port Card on your ISA Bus!
Although I dealt with only a few MCA installations - primarily 4/16 Token Ring NICs or 10BT Ethernet NICs on IBM System 70 -ish Machines, with the occasional new Video Adapter installs, my MCA experience and study came shortly before PCI Bussing was released.
Similar to the Reverse Engineering of IBM's ROM BIOS on the XT 8088 (correction requested), so was the "Non-Proprietary" version of IBM's Microchannel Architecture:
.... The new high speed "Peripheral Component Interconnect" Bus - which incorporated "Plug & Play" capabilities (Software Configuration) inspired by the development of MCA.
PCI Bus speed was 33MHZ (IIRC), and MCA was either 16MHZ, or 25MHZ (IIRC). Both eliminated those annoying Bottleneck issues of the elder 8/16MHZ ISA Bus, which kept the Machine from entering Boat Anchor Mode from endless waitstates.
Well, I really do not know what got me on this PCI Bus Tangent, other than My wife's Aunt is forcing us to drink Beer and Rum..., so let me return to that before She gets upset and breaks out the Tequila!!!
--Scott (EE)
