jawitz@ursa.UUCP (Eric Jawitz) (08/10/90)
Those of you in the market for a 386 motherboard might be interested in my experience with a new Micronics board. I recently acquired their Cache 386-25 and installed it in my AT case in place of the old -286 board. The documentation was clear and concise. I just hooked up the necessary cables, set the DIP switches to the proper configuration (cache enabled, 4 meg, no co-processor), plugged in all my old boards (Paradise VGA, Herc. monochrome + parallel port, 2 I/O boards, a scanner board, disk controller) and let 'er rip. The BIOS setup screen came up, I told the machine what I had (disks, memory, etc.) and the thing booted up correctly *on the first try*! I've been using it since without any problems. Since I was new to 386 machines and didn't have expanded memory on my old -286, I didn't know much about memory drivers such as QEMM and 386MAX. Well, I called up Micronics directly and asked them what I needed to access all of the 4-meg I had. I got through immediately to a technician who took my name and number and recommended either QEMM or 386MAX. About 15 minutes after I got off the phone, he called back to tell me that QEMM 5.0 didn't always work properly with their board due to a bug in the driver, and that I should make sure to get the older version (4.2?) if I were to decide on QEMM. Now that's service! I also asked him about the caching and how it worked and he was glad and even eager to explain it to me over the phone. I have no affiliation with Micronics. I'm simply a satisfied customer eager to pass on information to those of you considering buying a new motherboard. Hope the above will help some of you. If any of you would like more details, just send me E-mail and I'll answer what questions I can. Please note that I'm not sending this posting from my own account. E-mail should be directed to the address which appears below. -Ed beareq!thieb@wheaties.ai.mit.edu