The problem of speed control of a DC drive system with a variable moment-of-inertia load has recently been considered for the purpose of comparison of the performance of a non-linear adaptive control system and a classical linear control system. The results of this comparison apparently show that the performance of the adaptive controller is inferior to that of the linear control configuration under non-ideal conditions. This paper uses the same example to show that a simple adaptive controller can easily overcome the difficulties of this test.