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
--
___ ___ ___ ___ _ _ _ ___
/ __\| . \/ . \| . \| |/ /|_|| _ | "Mothers Against Skunks Driving...
\___\| __/| || _ /| < | || _[ ...because stinking and driving don't mix"
\___/|_| |_|_||_|\\|_|\_\|_||___| - heard on a madison radio station
ARPA: harier!sparkie at cs.wisc.edu, sparkie at uhura.cs.wisc.edu
UUCP: ...{harvard|rutgers|ucbvax}!uwvax!astroatc!nicmad!madnix!harier!sparkie
More information about the Comp.sys.att
mailing list