To: Don Earl who wrote (11904 ) 9/2/1998 6:45:00 PM From: mark doubiago Read Replies (1) | Respond to
Hi Don, footprint means 2 dimensional area taken up by something. So if something has the same footprint it takes up the same amount of 2 dimensional space. For example many of the S3 chips have the same footprint, so they take up the same amount of space on the graphics card, though one may stick out farther or be taller than the other. Amazing how hard it is to simply state something, sorry for the wordiness. I wouldn't guess that that would be a problem with a Savage as I believe most of the new chips are much larger/have a bigger footprint than previous generations of chips. Now about cards working with any computer. That probably never happens in any system with any cards. Nothing in the PC world is bug free, especially Windows. Nothing really ever exactly matches anything else that it is supposed to work with either. Most OEMs spend a lot of time trying to get everything in their PCs just right. And for the most part they work reasonably well together. But there will always be mismatches, even minor ones can really screw things up. Another problem is wild programs(including windows) that write over other programs code or delete or change files that other programs depend on. I am always in a state of fixing things on my system, because of this problem with programs. Sure i could let some of these things go and run with a less than optimal system, but some of them you just have to fix to get a program or piece of hardware to work. Sure, someone can throw a power supply, motherboard, fan, harddrive, and a few cards into a case, but the odds of getting all of them to work together is not that good. You will always have to fudge things and changes hardware switches and software settings. Many times no matter what you do, a part will not work in a system. Ask anyone who has tried putting in a new motherboard (main system card with CPU, that most everything else plugs into). Hope this helps and doesn't confuse too much, I spent 11 hours today, finishing up some software code and trying to document it so that it was understandable by the next guy. That is another big problem, poor or no documentation, so the guys can't figure out how to set anything up right anyway.
