bc@mit-amt.MEDIA.MIT.EDU (bill coderre) (01/01/87)
Where I work we ordered 6 Mac Snap boards from Dove. These piggyback onto several chips on the Mac 512 logic board and give you 2048K without cutting the logic board. We were told over the phone that they were easy to install, and that they were Hyperdrive compatible. They suggested that we would have no problem installing them ourselves. I was appointed to install some of the boards. I am reasonably proficient with hardware, and have opened plenty of Macs for various reasons. I opened one box and carefully read the documentation. Another person opened another. They got an update sheet to the instructions. I did not. This update was a tiny yelllow square of paper with microscopic typing on it. It told me almost a completely new way to install the boards. Another tiny yellow paper told me how to use MacSnap with a hyperdrive. It looked hard, since the hyperdrive clip and the macsnap board seemed to almost overlap, so I put it off. The mechanism for installing the board is very simple -- on the underside of the MacSnap board are clip sockets. You line up the MacSnap board over the logic board, and press them together to seat their clips on the chips on the logic board. No wires, no cutting. I looked over the board and found that they were hand-soldered. Then I looked at the clip sockets on the board, and read the instructions about them. It said to make sure the clip sockets were free of flack plastic and that the pins were straight. I found that most of the sockets needed cleaning up, trying to bend the pins back often broke them off, no matter how careful I was. I called Dove, and they suggested that I return the boards and that they would send "new, improved boards". Another experiment with an "old" MacSnap board almost got it working, but crashed randomly. So I found a local dealer that was the official Dove installation place. We sent off the old boards, and sent some Macs there. They tried to install the boards, and ended up getting one correctly installed. They gave up on installing the rest. Those got sent back, and we paid for one board. Sometime after that, the modem port on this machine ceased to work (no allegations by me that the MacSnap board was the culprit) and so we returned the machine to be serviced. The tech removed the MacSnap board to service the modem port, fixed that, reinstalled the MacSnap, and sent it back. When my colleague booted it, it had only 512K available. Seems the tech didn't check. Well, we have just sent it back in. We'll see if they can correctly reinstall the MacSnap board. ............................................................bc