eoshaugh@nmsu.edu (Erik Oshaughnessy) (03/08/91)
Our 68040 upgrades arrived yesterday for three of our old and decrepit 030 machines, and we had some "interesting" experiences do the installation ourselves. Thought some of you might be interested in hearing about them ( or alternately, you can skip this article :) Summary ======= 1. The 68040 upgrade makes the NeXT super fast. 2. Two of our three upgrade boards were defective to varying degree. 3. Installation was fairly simple. Installing the new boards was a fairly simple operation, except that the defective boards complicated things somewhat. One board was completely broken and refused to function in any sense of the word. We spent two hours trying varying combinations of SIMMs ( mixed 9bit/8bit, 8bit, and 9bit ), varying device configurations, and swapping batteries. Nothing awakened the board. The second defective board refused to acknowledge SIMMs installed in bank 3 ( the fourth bank ). NeXT has agreed to ship two new boards within 2 days. The upgrade kit comes with everything you need except the NeXT Tool(tm). It even includes a tool for prying off SIMMs from your old board for installation on the new one. Nice touch. Also included is an optical disk drive air filter, which we concluded it was hard to install, but a good idea. The actual installation of the board is fairly simple, and is outlined nicely in the installation docs. The installation consists of taking out the old board and putting in the new board. We had to be careful of the the heat sink for the 68040 since it almost reaches the side of the drive/power supply stack in the machine. Same goes for the SIMMS. It seems that the banks are just slightly higher on this board and althought the SIMMs were firmly seated, some of them were high enough to scrap along the sides of the upper drive. That's about it. Make sure you have some strong fingers around to undo all the internal connections, and be careful to connect the board to the optical and hard drives *before* you seat it in the chassis. Can't tell you how many times we forgot to do that. ;) Hope that was of some interest... regards, _____________________________________________________________________________ ~ | Erik O'Shaughnessy |\/\/\/| ~ | Small Systems | | ~ | New Mexico State University | * | ~ ()========= | Las Cruces, NM USA | (x)(x) L_l===== | eoshaugh@dante.nmsu.edu C _) ==== |------------------------------------ | ,___| ==== |"Do not follow the NULL pointer, | / | for that path leads to chaos, /____\ Die Bart! Die! | and madness." - me | \ | -----------------------------------------------------------------------------