ijk@hou5e.UUCP (Ihor Kinal) (03/22/85)
(DUPLICATE - first posting never made it out).
I recently acquired a dual floppy AT&T PC 6300 for my home use, and I
was rapidly driven to utter frustration by both the waste of time in
exchanging floppies back and forth and the slow performance of my
editor/compiler. I tried a ramdisk, but since I only had 256K
of memory, I found that was too little to hold everything I wanted
(in particular, the compiler would leave temporaries around when it
failed, which left very little room for the editor to work in).
In the past few months, the various PC magazines have reviewed RAMDISK
and memory boards, and one highly rated board is the TALL GRASS
JRAM 2X board (it comes in several flavors that include extra ports,
etc., all of which I didn't need - the 2X is just the basic board
plus software). Retail price $219 - pretty cheap for a memory
board, but WAIT: 47th Street Computer is selling them for $129.95.
(212-260-4410 or 800-221-7774). Delivery time was under 10 days.
It comes with some nifty software for setting up RAM disks, doing
faster copies, etc,etc,etc................... This board supposedly
allows upto 704K ram for DOS, and more for RAMDISKS!! How much
more??? Well, if you use 64K ram chips, you can plug in upto
512K per board, if you use 256K chips, upto 2 MEG per board, up to
8 boards per system, if you have the expansion slots. (No,
you can't address it all simultaneously, but yes, you can use it
nicely for ramdisks).
-----------------------------------------
What good are RAMDISK's See my comments at the end for some suggestions
if you're not familiar with this concept.
-----------------------------------------
Anyway, it all sounds pretty
good, but not GREAT, until you look at inexpensive 256K RAM chips.
I found a place that seems reliable and that sells NEC for $8.75 and
TOSHIBA chips for $8.25. If you give them you credit card number, they'll
allow you to pay by check when you receive your chips. Ship by UPS
in 2 days is $3.00, by Federal is $6.00 (I never received anything
at home via Federal, so I was really tempted, but I didn't bother).
When my board arrived, I plugged these chips in and off I went with
some glitches (the current release of the AT&T system DOES NOT work
with the JRAM software, but IBM software works fine, even on an AT&T.
This problem will hopefully be resolved in the near future.
Also, if you have a true 16 bit machine like the 6300, you may prefer
to reserve the 256K chips for the mother board - then you'll have
fast, 16bit access to the extra memory at a very reasonable price.
BUT, check to see if your main memory is soldered in - if you bought
a hard disk unit, then all the mother board memory is soldered on a
6300 {I believe}, and swapping chips is not a trivial task.
Lately, I've seen ads for 16bit memory enhancement boards for the
6300, but they're not cheap, and the performance of the 8 bit boards
seems to be more than adequate).
The name of the place where I got my chips is: Microprocessors Unlimited
Beggs,OK. 918-267-4961. I highly recommend this place, they seem top
notch. Mention you read it on netnews - maybe we'll be able to
negotiate a group discount in the future.
That's all folks.
Ihor Kinal hou5e!ijk
(I have no association with 47th Street Computers or Microprocessors
Unlimited except as a satisfied customer; I no longer have any
association with the PC 6300 except as satisfied user; I'm presently
a contract employee at AT&TIS).
P.S. RAMDISK usuage - almost anything you can do on either floppy disks,
or hard disks, you can do faster on a ramdisk. (Roughly 5 times
faster than a hard disk). My autoexec.bat file now copies another
file to the ramdisk, and then executes it from there (have you noticed
that a bat file accesses your disk each time it reads a line, and then
each time it executes the line?? That's very time-consuming and
hard on your drives). Then I use a utility from the software that
come with the board to copy a load of software to the ramdisk (this
software is faster than the DOS copy command, and if the file is
already there, it doesn't copy it again). I copy my editor, the
various passes of the compiler, includes, libraries, etc. While
debugging my source files, I copy each file to the ramdisk; then I test
compile it (my compiles really fly now). When I'm done, I copy the
file back to the floppy. My efficiency now approaches that of a user
with a hard disk, and possibly exceeds someone with just a hard disk
but no ram disk. ijk@houxt.UUCP (I.KINAL) (03/27/85)
(DUPLICATE - first postings never made it out).
I recently acquired a dual floppy AT&T PC 6300 for my home use, and I
was rapidly driven to utter frustration by both the waste of time in
exchanging floppies back and forth and the slow performance of my
editor/compiler. I tried a ramdisk, but since I only had 256K
of memory, I found that was too little to hold everything I wanted
(in particular, the compiler would leave temporaries around when it
failed, which left very little room for the editor to work in).
In the past few months, the various PC magazines have reviewed RAMDISK
and memory boards, and one highly rated board is the TALL GRASS
JRAM 2X board (it comes in several flavors that include extra ports,
etc., all of which I didn't need - the 2X is just the basic board
plus software). Retail price $219 - pretty cheap for a memory
board, but WAIT: 47th Street Computer is selling them for $129.95.
(212-260-4410 or 800-221-7774). Delivery time was under 10 days.
It comes with some nifty software for setting up RAM disks, doing
faster copies, etc,etc,etc................... This board supposedly
allows upto 704K ram for DOS, and more for RAMDISKS!! How much
more??? Well, if you use 64K ram chips, you can plug in upto
512K per board, if you use 256K chips, upto 2 MEG per board, up to
8 boards per system, if you have the expansion slots. (No,
you can't address it all simultaneously, but yes, you can use it
nicely for ramdisks).
-----------------------------------------
What good are RAMDISK's See my comments at the end for some suggestions
if you're not familiar with this concept.
-----------------------------------------
Anyway, it all sounds pretty
good, but not GREAT, until you look at inexpensive 256K RAM chips.
I found a place that seems reliable and that sells NEC for $8.75 and
TOSHIBA chips for $8.25. If you give them you credit card number, they'll
allow you to pay by check when you receive your chips. Ship by UPS
in 2 days is $3.00, by Federal is $6.00 (I never received anything
at home via Federal, so I was really tempted, but I didn't bother).
When my board arrived, I plugged these chips in and off I went with
some glitches (the current release of the AT&T system DOES NOT work
with the JRAM software, but IBM software works fine, even on an AT&T.
This problem will hopefully be resolved in the near future.
Also, if you have a true 16 bit machine like the 6300, you may prefer
to reserve the 256K chips for the mother board - then you'll have
fast, 16bit access to the extra memory at a very reasonable price.
BUT, check to see if your main memory is soldered in - if you bought
a hard disk unit, then all the mother board memory is soldered on a
6300 {I believe}, and swapping chips is not a trivial task.
Lately, I've seen ads for 16bit memory enhancement boards for the
6300, but they're not cheap, and the performance of the 8 bit boards
seems to be more than adequate).
The name of the place where I got my chips is: Microprocessors Unlimited
Beggs,OK. 918-267-4961. I highly recommend this place, they seem top
notch. Mention you read it on netnews - maybe we'll be able to
negotiate a group discount in the future.
Ihor Kinal hou5e!ijk
(I have no association with 47th Street Computers or Microprocessors
Unlimited except as a satisfied customer; I no longer have any
association with the PC 6300 except as satisfied user; I'm presently
a contract employee at AT&TIS).
P.S. RAMDISK usuage - almost anything you can do on either floppy disks,
or hard disks, you can do faster on a ramdisk. (Roughly 5 times
faster than a hard disk). My autoexec.bat file now copies another
file to the ramdisk, and then executes it from there (have you noticed
that a bat file accesses your disk each time it reads a line, and then
each time it executes the line?? That's very time-consuming and
hard on your drives). Then I use a utility from the software that
come with the board to copy a load of software to the ramdisk (this
software is faster than the DOS copy command, and if the file is
already there, it doesn't copy it again). I copy my editor, the
various passes of the compiler, includes, libraries, etc. While
debugging my source files, I copy each file to the ramdisk; then I test
compile it (my compiles really fly now). When I'm done, I copy the
file back to the floppy. My efficiency now approaches that of a user
with a hard disk, and possibly exceeds someone with just a hard disk
but no ram disk.