Typical long day at work.  I decide to knock off at 4:45 and play with
Mandrake install again.  To do this, I have to yank the old drive, swap
cables and put things back together.   While doing this I realize that
in the bios there is a boot setting, for either Primary-Master or
Primary-Slave.  Hmm.  I try things out and put my new drive in as
Primary-Slave.  Mandrake (7.2) has a fit saying it can't do something. 
I swap drive snd which one to boot and it works.  Ok, a little progress,
now at least I don't have to unplug cables.

I had attempted to D/L Mandrake on two PC's during the day.  I
downloaded it from my NT box and burned a coaster . . . no particular
reason why.  It just wouldn't boot.  I decided to poke around a bit more
in the Mandrake box.  It had found my HP burner and was happily waiting
to burn something.  I decided to give another download of an ISO a shot
and after ?? hours I had an ISO to burn.  I used CD-R-Toaster (?) . . .
something to that effect.   That program was about as intuitive as the
space shuttle . . . another glaring "I'm a techie and don't care how it
looks/works/etc..." type of program.  After burning a CD in a foreign
(to me) OS, I decided "ah, what the hell" and thought I would try to
upgrade my previous Mandrake 7.2 install.

Well, it worked just as advertised.  After all the modules/etc... loaded
up and were updated I was greeted to something 1000% better than I had
been playing with.   I just got done setting up Ximina Evolution and my
jaw hit the floor.  KDE Mail was "ok".  It was about like my older
Eudora, but still lacking a little power.  From what I can see so far of
Ximian, it flat blows again my Eudora and looks to be a replacement for
Outlook (which I don't use).  This right here could be the changing of a
few minds at my office (well soon to be former office, as I'm buying the
company I work for).  

Anyway . . . I just wanted to let you in on a "3 year old newbie"
experience with Mandrake and Linux in general.  This is a far cry from
getting a PC to boot up with something that didn't say "Microsoft" on it
back in 1998 when I first bought Red Hat 5.2 from CompUSA.