andrew@aeras.uucp (Andrew Ward) (12/15/90)
From my earlier post on the quality issues of the Dataworld LP-320, there were two responses. Alan Krantz suggests that it the reduced performance may be from wait-stated memory. If one re-reads the article closely, they would read that I said this is a 0 wait state configuration! Unless Dataworld misled me, this is true. I was very specific and clear with them on this point, and they assured me that this is 0 wait state. Other configurations available require 1 or 2 wait states, but using 2 Mb or 8 Mb results in 0 wait states. This just prompted me to call DW. I had a long conversation with one of their engineers. It turns out that the LP-320 runs in paged, interleaved mode. Because of this configuration, it actually takes 3 cpu clock cycles for each address cycle. These are also commonly called "cache wait states". Many systems run with this configuration and yet call it a 0 wait state machine. . On the Windows problem, Georg Wang inquired about which BIOS it was running. It is running the Award Stingray BIOS. This is the same code as the Cirrus Logic Stingray BIOS. The problem is that the entire machine locks up when attempting to run applications in the background. The display does not go blank. Changing all the PIF file settings is no use, nothing seems to help. DW says they are beginning to get a handle on it. It may be related to one or more of three problems: 1) size of LCD BIOS and memory requirements (windows seems to expect 32K, yet this bios uses 64K; 2) a problem with the address line A20 which, in some cases, is required to be disabled, yet in others it is not (one of the chips in the chipset may may not be disabling it fast enough); and (or) 3) the HIMEM.SYS acts goofey. Either way, they are working on it. One of the other engineers at DW told me that if I force it in to EGA mode with the DIP switches, it won't lock up. I haven't confirmed this yet. Did anyone get my hint? My Toshiba T1200H is for sale. I have an external 360K floppy drive, a 1200 baud internal modem, and a thick/thinnet internal ethernet board for sale. PC weighs 10 lbs, has 1 Mb RAM, 20 Mb hard disk. I'll make a deal.. (408) 922-8393 +-----------------------------------------------------------------------------+ | Andrew Ward ...sun!aeras!andrew | | Arix Computer Corp. (for now) San Jose, CA USA | +-----------------------------------------------------------------------------+