roskos@csed-1.UUCP (Eric Roskos) (02/23/88)
A few months ago, I bought a Jameco JE1003 "Baby AT" CPU Board from Jameco Electronics, about the time they lowered the price to $400. Although I am generally very pleased with the board (I just took out my XT-clone CPU board and put this one in; it works fine with XT peripherals, and fits in the same cabinet), I noticed a few minor bugs with the BIOS, and also had a question about whether I could get zero wait-states at 10 MHz, so I wrote a letter to Jameco about a week ago, asking them various questions and telling them about the BIOS bugs I'd noticed. I also mentioned that I periodically had problems with the battery-powered clock losing its setting. Today I got a somewhat surprising letter back from Jameco. They didn't answer the question about the wait states, but they said this (the grammatical and punctuation errors are from the letter, not mine): "The clock circuitry has been a problem with the JE1003 system board for a long time, as of this time we have taken two steps to resolve the problem. The first was to attempt to have Award Software rewrite the Bios routine that controls the system boot clock speed, and to have the manufacture change the hardware to compensate for the clock/calender (sic.) problems. To this point the manufacture (sic.) of the board has made the hardware changes and our new JE1007 system board no longer has any of the JE1003 boards (sic.) problems. The BIOS revision has not as of yet been released to us that will resolve the clock/calender problem on the JE1003's." Now, I will say I am glad that they admitted this is a problem, and I don't want the tech support person to get in trouble for having admitted this. On the other hand, I am first of all somewhat annoyed to find that Jameco is selling a board which has had known hardware problems "for a long time," for the same price other manufacturers are charging for different boards that possibly don't have this problem. But, much more than that, I am curious what the problem is with this board? According to other parts of the letter, other people have apparently identified the problem, and told Jameco about it, such that, in their words, "we were able to fully document these types of problems and get them corrected." Does anybody reading this have one of these boards, and know what the problem actually is? I wouldn't mind making modifications to the board if it were correctable. I am also curious if anyone knows any more about this board: who is it made by? Is it the same as any of the other "Baby AT" boards on the market? Has anyone bought the same board from a different vendor and gotten different documentation? (One of the questions I asked in my letter was whether there was more detailed documentation available, since Jameco has obviously rewritten the manual to be "user friendly"; the reply was simply "The manuals have been rewritten because the manuals that come with the boards are not clear enough for a first time computer buyer to set up the system to be operational." Is there a known way to get it to have zero wait states at 10 MHz? None of these questions were answered by Jameco, although they did say that the new board would have better documentation in this regard. If you have any information on this, please send me email; I don't normally read this group due to a lack of time. If there is enough interest I will summarize the responses. I am curious about this CPU board. Incidentally, the problems I have found which I reported are: - The "start-up speed" configuration option in the BIOS seems to have been designed for a CPU with two clock speeds. It lets you choose either 12 MHz, 8 MHz, or a seemingly nondeterministically-chosen 8 or 10 MHz. If you jumper the CPU board to give only 2 speeds (8 and 10), however, it works backwards: selecting "low" in the menu gives you "high" speed, and selecting "high" gives you "low" speed. This seems to be an Award BIOS problem. (To clarify, for those unfamiliar with this BIOS: if you type CTRL-ALT-ESC, you get a fairly nice full-screen menu of configuration options, including a running clock (sometimes with nonnumeric characters in the time field, still counting away... :-)), but the "start-up speed" field of this display only has "LOW", "HIGH", and "NO CHANGE". With the jumpers set to give all 4 speeds, "LOW" gives nondeterministically 6 or 10 MHz, "HIGH" gives 12 MHz, and "NO CHANGE" gives 8 MHz (not what the speed was last set to, the way the name would imply).) - Sometimes when you power on the machine, the clock contains garbage. This happens maybe 1 in 10 times. I will say, in conclusion, once again, that I am glad Jameco was at least honest enough to admit that there is a hardware problem with the board, and am glad that they have fixed it in the new boards; and that, actually, it is very nice hardware despite this problem -- I haven't yet found anything that won't run on it, and it works very well with my old peripherals, even a highly nonstandard hard disk controller from JDR. (I am using the BIOS on the disk controller; I specified "no hard disks" to the JE1003's setup menu.) I suppose that a lot of people would make a big fuss over it, and demand that Jameco give them a refund or a new CPU board, and I'll admit that is tempting; but, there aren't that many companies out there that carry the boards (my favorite, the best mail order company I've ever done business with, DoKay, seems to have recently gone out of business), and given the fact that they are reselling someone else's board, they are somewhat caught in the middle. They could decide it is not worth the trouble to carry the boards, and then we'd be stuck with the more expensive alternatives. And, too, I did write this posting, so at least you know to beware. But, I would like to fix the problem with the board. -- Eric Roskos, IDA (...dgis!csed-1!roskos or csed-1!roskos@HC.DSPO.GOV)