Re: Weirdness with AlphaPC 164: installing SRM firmware, etc.

[axp amazing ch (Christoph Dworzak)]

On Dec 9 tibor (tibor@lib.uaa.alaska.edu) wrote:
> I just recently read a message someone posted here with a similar system
> from an Ebay auction where a friend of his who apparently was an ex-DEC
> hardware tech. found a loose solder connection on his motherboard and
> fixed it for him.  If that person is still here on the list, could you
> perhaps post any more details?

This was probably me...

The symptoms of my PC164 (which I bought new from Vobis for ~4500$, not
from daved) where just random. I had everything from spontaneus reboots
to lockups which didn't go away even after power off and on again, to
CIA machine chacks to endlessly scrolling numbers on the screen and
some more quirks.

I replaced battery, ram, gfx-card, scsi-card, nic, power-supply, hd,
floppy,... and it seemed to fix the problem every time i changed
something, but now i know it was just because i was touching the
mainboard and the bad contact moved a little bit and made it work
for a while. but from heat expansion and vibration it would
eventually loose contact again.

the bad contact was on U14, near U12.


i also bought 2 SX164 from daved@sysmerica.com. one of them just didn't
work, so i sent it back and he replaced it with no problems. i don't
know what exactly was wrong with it.

the other trouble i had with the sx was memory. they are really picky
about mem. my friendly dealer replaced them twice with different
brands. the were all PC100 DIMMS, but either some RAM-Manufacturers
don't respect the Specs or the the SX164 needs something better
than PC100 (there's a compatibility list somewhere on the dec-site,
but it was of no use to me, because no dealer i contacted could
find any of those DIMMs...


i must say, i had quite some troubles with those alphas, but now
that they finally work, i really like them :)

Bye
 dworz