jik@athena.mit.edu (Jonathan I. Kamens) (06/15/89)
The place at which I am working for the summer just bought six Wyse PC IBM-compatible workstations as part of a package to automate their plant. Unfortunately, the incredibly honest reseller that packaged and sold us the whole set-up managed to sell us five of those workstations with only 512k, which is apparently not enough memory for the workstations to be able to print from within the software packages we are using. Despite the fact that we have not gotten the operation we were told we would be getting when we bought the system, we are being told by this guy that he's going to make us pay for at least half of the cost of upgrading the memory in the workstations. I told him that I would like to look into buying the chips and doing the upgrade myself, since it (I assume) involves only plugging the new chips in, so I asked him what type of chips, and how many, I would need to upgrade each workstation. He told me I would need "18 256k 120 nanosecond" chips for each machine, and he said the cost would be about $150 for each workstation. I am not convinced he knows what he is talking about, but I have not done a lot of work with PC's and memories so I don't even know where to start looking to find out what we really need (and, of course, the manuals that came with the workstations don't have schematics or chip details, I don't think). So, my questions are, what kind of chips is this guy talking about; is he giving me correct information; if not, what chips should I be looking for (will Radio Shack have them, or will I need to go somewhere more specialized, or are the Wyse specific chips); and how much should they cost? I am sorry I can't provide more information, but this guy isn't exactly a fountain of knowledge and I'm a bit out of my field here. Please reply via E-mail only, since this question is certainly not really of general interest, and because I don't read either comp.sys.ibm.pc or sci.electronics regularly. Thanks in advance for any help you can provide! Jonathan Kamens USnail: MIT Project Athena 432 S. Rose Blvd. jik@Athena.MIT.EDU Akron, OH 44320 Office: 617-253-4261 Home: 216-869-6432
rzahavi@gateway.mitre.org (Ron Zahavi) (06/16/89)
Call 1-800-GET-WYSE and ask for the customer service number in California.
I don't recall the number and unfortunately it is not an 800 number.
I called this number several months ago in regards to purchasing the BIOS
update and DOS 3.3 to replace my DOS 3.1 and old BIOS, and they were very
helpful (they also seemed to know what they were talking about).
-- Ron --
==============================================================================
Ron Zahavi (703) 883-5637 Mitre Corporation
rzahavi@gateway.mitre.org 7525 Colshire Drive
McLean, VA 22102
==============================================================================dennis@sequent.UUCP (Dennis Storz) (06/17/89)
Are these Wyse386 PC'S? If they are I would caution you against doing the memory upgrade yourself...we have four of these and have had so many memory problems that we had to swap first the memory boards, then the memory expansion boards, then the PROM on the memory board, then the entire CPU board and finally the entire machine. They work OK now, but this took literally months to solve. If I were you I would pay the extra money to make sure you get the right stuff to begin with.
ldh@hardy.harris.com (Leo Hinds) (07/22/89)
The best source of info for the type of chips required is WYSE itself ... you can reach them @ their tech support number ... (408)435-2770. If you are trying to use their '386 based machine ... When we tried the upgrade we were told that the MEM was not your typical DRAM ... it was operating in a special mode (don't remember exactly) and so there is a restricted number of places to buy.