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Wrestling with Hardware- by Eric Slaats

I've won... at least, I think so.

Most of us are familiar with the feeling of relief when new hardware works and the feeling of harsh annoyance when things just refuse to. Some time ago I decided to by a parallel port ZIP drive for my system. This way I could install all the compilers and other stuff needed for the projects I works on, on a ZIP drive. The idea was to take the whole thing with me and hook it up at work so I would always have the same environment. I'm also a lecturer so I wanted to be able to show students some more complex stuff with a notebook on the overhead like how an API really looks and works, Delphi stuff, etc. And the large database projects I work on could also benefit from this. The complete project prototypes could run from a ZIP disk with original data. Great for prototyping; simply hook the ZIP drive to a user's machine and show him what you think it should look like. The notes made during such a session could even be stored on the same ZIP.

If it seems too good to be true...

Of course, the idea was too good to work immediately! When I hooked up the drive on my old and trusted 486 DX2, it refused to work. I really liked that old 486. Overall, it was fast; it had two fast hard drives and enough memory (32 Mb which cost me dearly 4 years ago). And it used one of the early Vesa local bus boards and had a fairly good video system with a Diamond Stealth Pro card. OS/2 was running very smoothly on it and I did all my development and writing on this machine. Well, maybe I'm a little too sentimental.

Anyway, I really wanted this ZIP stuff to work, so I did a little research. Despite what the advertising says, there are machines out there that don't support a bidirectional parallel port. I checked out my BIOS and according to some people I talked with, it should support ECC parallel ports. Only, the motherboard for some reason, didn't.

So I bought a parallel adapter card for 15 guilders (about US$8). This didn't work either. (The $8 isn't wasted, my ZIP is humming happily on that card right now. Besides, I regularly detach the ZIP so it's convenient that it doesn't use the printer port. I recommend this investment for every parallel port removable media user.)

The original idea of using the ZIP for this stuff was already a month old and I started to get impatient. Also, programs I was writing were starting to take a long time to compile. (Compiling the complete Smalled code took me about 2.30 minutes.) So, faster hardware was welcome. Oh, and I received Warp 4.0 (I really like the name Merlin better). After installing it, I found it very slow on my 486. And of course, the voice thing was out of the question.

That did it, I decided that after 5 years the old DX2 had to be replaced with something new. The old machine had been regularly updated, but I couldn't take it any further. I decided (as I did when I bought the DX2) to skip a processor generation. So a Pentium PRO 200 would be my choice. I wanted a balanced machine with as little problems as possible, so I decided on the following:

How did I come to these decisions? Well, I have had very good experiences with Quantum: fast disks for a reasonable price. Having had major trouble with my old sound card (a 5 year old 8 bit-er), I decided to play it safe and use a Sound Blaster. (I also found the price reasonable which I didn't 5 years ago.)

I decided on the S3, based on my experiences with the Diamond Stealth Pro (864). This was a major error as it turned out! I made another major error, too. My hardware supplier offered me a 3.5 Gig drive which was also a PIO4 for the same price as the Fireball. He assured me it was a good drive, that he had built it into many machines and never had problems. He also offered to take it back if it wasn't satisfactory (luckily).

At this point I had made two major mistakes:
1) I didn't check the newsgroups for signals on hostile hardware.
2) I got resource greedy and so dropped quality hardware.

Delivery Day

I got the machine in assembled status. The first weird thing I noticed was that the CD didn't respond very well. Sometimes it wasn't found at all! It even seemed slower that my old single-speed drive. Usually I never tweak the BIOS when a system runs satisfactory, but now I decided to have a look. The hard disk was set up as primary master, but the CD-ROM was attached as secondary slave! I was surprised it worked at all. (I later checked with the supplier and he assured me they always did it that way. When I showed them the benchmarks for the CD in the two different settings, they simply couldn't believe it.)

So the first hurdle was overcome, the CD was set up as secondary master. No problems there. After that, Warp 3.0 and Merlin installed like a breeze. But they were still running at 640x480.

I used the 17" Trinitron monitor of my old machine, so what I wanted was my old and trusted 1280x1024 (65K colours) back. The OS/2 CD's didn't contain any Virge drivers (the device driver pack did!) but luckily with the Virge came a CD from S3 with drivers. I tried them under Warp 3.0 and they installed perfectly. As usual, I first tried some lower resolutions; at 1024x768x256 the card worked OK. But.... when I tried 1280x1024 the bad things happened. The machine very regularly locked up the Desktop. And these lockups occurred at random, especially when:

1) More than one object was dragged over the Desktop or a maximized window.
2) When a command prompt window was active and a drag was initiated.
3) When text was selected in an MLE control.
4) When the cursor keys were used to walk through a listbox or tree viewed container.
5) When Win-OS/2 was started.

I tried this under Merlin and had more or less the same effects. I also installed Win95 for my Delphi clinics and (luckily) I experienced strange lockups in Win95 (as well as Win NT 4.0) with this card. After the first two lockups under Windows, I decided not to try anything else. Since the driver I used was from S3 I tried to contact them through the Internet. They told me to contact the manufacturer of the card. The manufacturer told me to contact S3 since they provide the drivers. (Sound familiar?)

I had definitely had it with the Virge card. I tried virtually every trick I could think of, I even edited the video files (not recommended) -- the errors simply stayed. Since lockups need a reboot this took an enormous amount of my time, and my mood (and that of my family) was rapidly sinking. I decided to try some of the S3 TRIO cards I use at work for experiments (only VIO). I wasn't completely happy, because S3 didn't seem very trusted at that moment, but I needed a solution fast. (More about the TRIO in a moment.)

More Problems...

In the mean time this new machine had produced another flaw. Since the Desktop lockups need a reset of the machine, I regularly needed to watch the machine check the boot partition. The strange thing was that it stalled during this check 3 out of 4 times. The machine simply didn't show any sign of life after it locked in a CHKDSK. Luckily this one was very simple to reproduce and I showed it to a very moody supplier (he wasn't too happy to begin with, after my video card adventures). He agreed to take the disk back and swap it for the Fireball. I was also moody because I had just installed everything on this 3Gb hard disk -- it took me hours! The Fireball seemed to work perfectly (it even was faster than the other HD), so I was happy about that.

Back to the S3 TRIO. This was a 2Mb card so I was limited to 256 colors in 1280x1024. I could live with that, so it was installed. I used the v2.84 driver on the device driver pack and found it had a lot of the flaws I experienced with the Virge.

My hopes for a working machine really hit rock bottom. I had been trying to get it to function for 3 weeks now. Then I heard a rumor that the 3.03.03 driver for this card was released. It took me some time to find it because it wasn't on the IBM device driver repository (strangely enough).

When I tried v3.03.01 it was a big improvement, however, not big enough, so I searched for v3.03.03. This driver worked great! I sometimes have a mysterious lockup, but I'm prepared now and it only happens once a week, so I can live with that. The annoying thing is that it happens more often in Win95 when I'm working with Delphi (but I found a patch to make Delphi work under OS/2, though!).

So I'm happy OS/2 is working well. I guess I've won; my machine is running happily and I'm as productive as ever (although I'm still catching up on the missed month).

What has helped me in this misery

The Internet. Really, it's a mistake not to try to find info, or to ask for advice about a new piece of hardware you want to buy. When I was desperately stalking the newsgroups for a piece of info, I stumbled upon the comp.os.os2.setup.video group. This is really a group to check if you're wanting to buy new video hardware or have a problem with it. And of course, some of you readers who reacted to my frustrated cry in my "How Do I?" column have helped me with pieces of the puzzle.

I found that the time I spent trying to make my new machine work has cost me a multiple of the amount the machine itself cost. Besides that, the whole process was very frustrating. If I could do it again, I think I would have spent some more money and bought a Matrox Millennium card. I'll never drop a quality piece of hardware again in favor of some dubious but "larger" piece of hardware.

Eric Slaats holds a degree in Computer Science and teaches computer technology in Eindhoven. He is the creator of the Smalled utilities.

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