Hello Nathan,

  NW> The 3c509 ISA cards are better than other ISA cards
    > because of their autoconfiguration of I/O space.
    > They're pretty much fire-and-forget. I would gladly
    > trade any performance advantages of other ISA cards
    > (are there any?) for the ease of configuration, not
    > having to download some weird DOS tool and find a boot
    > disk, etc....

If what you're talking about is Plug-and-Play then I would
much prefer not to have it.  I prefer the good old days when
you set jumpers to I/O address and IRQs you /knew/ were free
and they stay put.  I would happily trade the need to set a
card up once (and know it would stay set) than have a
machine's firmware move things around every now and again,
screwing other things up in the process.  I think we'll just
have to agree to differ on this one.

Regards,
 
-Andy.

_____________________________________________
Free email with cool domains at FriendlyEmail
http://www.mypad.com/