rgoldstone@OAVAX.CSUCHICO.EDU (Robin Goldstone) (02/06/91)
Last week I posted an inquiry for information about DayStar accelerators.
Several people requested a followup so here it is. I really didn't get
that many replies, but based on those that I did receive, it looks like
the DayStar board is fast and compatible with most Mac software. Here
is what others said:
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From tg@chmsr.gatech.edu:
We bought two of the 40MHz accelerators for our Mac IIs. We use them
to speed up a very large Lisp program (a marine power plant simulator
and an intelligent tutor for the power plant). The cards did speed up
the program perceptibly, even though I can't give you a figure for it.
It is not easy to compute a speed factor. For certain portions of the
program, speedup was considerable, close to twice the speed.
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From mccabe@cs.unc.edu:
I have a 50 MHz PowerCard 030 in my Mac II and I have not encountered any
compatibility problems in the 6 months that I have used it.
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From weigel@DPW.COM (William Weigel):
You recently asked about the Daystar 40 accelerator. I installed the
Daystar 40mHz in my Mac II about a month ago. In general I have been very
pleased with it. I timed certain operations on the old Mac II board before
installing the new one, and the difference in computing speed really was
dramatic.
The only odd thing I noticed was system crashes when my
screen-saver utility (After Dark) came on. My solution was to remove After
Dark, although I realize that this is not ideal. In addition, I think that
there have been several notes in this or other news groups recently
describing crashing problems after installing the Daystar accelerator; you
might want to look them up.
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From D2281@AppleLink.Apple.COM (David Metheven, Product Marketing Manager,
DayStar Digital, Inc):
I came across Robin's question about our (DayStar's) 40 MHz accelerator and
wanted to give you both a short message. The accelerators are completely
compatible with all commercial and virtually all shareware software.
(As long as Apple's developer guidelines are followed, there is never a
problem). The only problems we ever run into are related to INIT/CDEV
conflicts such as the one William was speaking of. The good news is that
our sool to be release CDEV, version 4.0, is not only System 7.0 compatible,
but also should reduce the number of INIT/CDEV conflicst that the users
have experienced.
Both the August 1990 issues of MacUser and MacWorld have very good articles
on the DayStar accelerators.
I hope this helps. William, you may want to keep a look out for version 4.0
of our CDEV, available either on AppleLink or direct from us at 800-962-2077.
Robin, keep in mind that we have a 30 day money back guarantee through most
resellers, so you really can't lose.
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Robin Goldstone, California State University, Chico Computing Services
rgoldstone@oavax.csuchico.edu