davek@lakesys.UUCP (Dave Kraft) (06/06/89)
Hi, I am contemplating buying a used PC-Turbo 286e add-on board that comes with 1 meg ram, which is manufactured by Orchid. Anybody have any good/bad comments about this product or company?? Also, does anyone know if software that is designed to run in the 286 protected mode will recognize the presence of this board?? Also, what happens to that 1 meg of ram if I've already got 640k? (256k on the motherboard, 384k on a multifuction card).. Any thoughts/ ideas/suggestions/responses would be helpful. Thanks in advance, Dave -- davek@lakesys.lakesys.com uunet!marque!lakesys!davek ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Forgetting your superuser password is just God's way of saying "BOOGA, BOOGA!"
mlawless@ncrwic.Wichita.NCR.COM (Mike Lawless) (06/07/89)
In article <688@lakesys.UUCP> davek@lakesys.UUCP (Dave Kraft) writes: >Hi, >I am contemplating buying a used PC-Turbo 286e add-on board that comes with >1 meg ram, which is manufactured by Orchid. Anybody have any good/bad >comments about this product or company? I have had one for a couple of years now, and it generally works pretty well. I have never tried any protected mode software on it, however; I got it strictly for the speed. One big caveat: if you have Hercules graphics on your system, then some recent-vintage Microsoft programs that use graphics, such as Chart 3.0 and Word 4.0 (I don't know about 5.0 yet) will cause a loss of horizontal sync on your display, which, if allowed to persist for more than a couple of seconds, will smoke the horizontal output transistor in your display. I found out the hard way. Interestingly enough, Chart 2.0 and Word 3.0 did not exhibit this behavior. Note also that no version of Windows has been observed to exhibit this effect. As usual, Orchid says it's Microsoft's problem, and Microsoft says it's Orchid's problem, and both steadfastly refuse to do anything to correct the incompatibility. So much for customer satisfaction. Therefore, if you want to use Word in the graphics mode, or Chart at all, you would be well advise to steer clear of the Orchid PC-Turbo 286e. -- Mike Lawless, NCR E&M Wichita, Box 20 (316) 636-8666 (NCR: 654-8666) 3718 N. Rock Road, Wichita, KS 67226 Mike.Lawless@Wichita.NCR.COM {ece-csc,hubcap,gould,rtech}!ncrcae!ncrwic!Mike.Lawless {sdcsvax,cbatt,dcdwest,nosc.ARPA}!ncr-sd!ncrwic!Mike.Lawless