Paul writes:
> I am specifically concerned with non-standard power supplies such
> as those which supply 3.3, 5 and 12 volts (3.3 is non-standard)[...]

3.3V is a fairly typical chip supply voltage now.  The days when all the
logic in a PC ran at +5V are long gone, and the day when nothing runs at
that voltage are probably not far away.  A Pentium IV CPU chip runs at 1.7
volts today, and much of the high speed support logic is probably similar,
so I would not be surprised to see power supplies evolving further into the
low voltage range as things progress.  CPUs will probably be running on less
than one volt of power before long.

> That cute little combination PCI card mentioned earlier for which there
> are no drivers except Win98.

Keep in mind that a lot of inexpensive systems sold today are effectively
"Windows machines" rather than general-purpose PCs.  The "Win Modem" type
devices are only supported in Windows because the card is actually missing
much of the hardware it needs to operate, which is instead supplied by a
software implementation running in a driver under Windows.  This means that
there is much more work required to produce a "driver" for another operating
system, and such a device generally will eat up much more CPU time because
the software has to do so much more work.

Another common scheme is to have embedded video hardware that shares the
system RAM rather than having its own video ram.  This eats up 2-16MB of the
memory in your system and is also less likely to be supported in non-Windows
operating systems.

G.

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