Warning about upgrading memory!

Mark Horn horn at cat19.cs.wisc.edu
Wed May 9 12:32:32 AEST 1990


Well, my machine, harier, has been upgraded from 1Meg to 2Meg memory and 
MGR runs without the disk constantly seeking.  A performance improvement,
indeed.  I thank the person (I can't remember who it was) who posted the
experiences and problems with this upgrade.  The instructions were very clear
and I'm liking life with 2Meg!!

However I wish to warn those of you out there wishing to do this upgrade.
I have a 40Meg Half-Height HD in my machine.  With the 7300 power supply, it
ran perfectly.  I only had one crash and that was not because of the power 
supply (it was because I was stupid).  Anyway, after I put in the second Meg
I noticed that I couldn't boot from my HD from time to time.  It was very
sporadic.  I could boot from floppy easily enough.  Coincidentally, this was
at the same time that Thad Floryan was posting information about how 
seagate drives can have this problem (My drive is a seagate st251-1).  Well, I
just attributed it to this problem, and left it be.  Being, as I'm stupid,
I didn't make a backup.  I didn't have time for that.

Anyway, it got to the point where no matter how hard I tried the drive would
not boot.  Well, I was not happy about this.  I then thought that Thad's 
assessment of his experiences with seagate drives had shown itself in my 
poor machine.  So, I reconciled it with myself that I had to get a new HD.
But I wanted to try and boot just once more so that I could back it up.
I figured I'd stick it in a machine with a 3b1 power supply and see if that 
wouldn't jump-start my drive so that I could back it up.   

Well, what do you know, but it worked!  I quickly did a back up and decided to 
see if it was luck or what.  Nope.  I powered down and booted up at will without
a glitch.  Then it hit me: in order to support the extra meg of memory I needed 
the 3b1 power supply!  Sure enough, I replaced my 7300 power supply with the
3b1 power supply that I never got around to installing, and I've been running
fine ever since.

So, after all of that, here's my warning:  If you plan to do this upgrade, make
sure you have a 3b1 power supply, or you may have trouble booting.  

FYI,
- sparkie
--
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