Setting up a VAXstation

[Roy J. Tellason]

On Saturday 06 October 2007 17:30, Tony Duell wrote:
> Again, how on earth cna you know what the fault is if you can't diagnose
> it. You mentioned swapping a DIMM. How can you know if an intermittant
> memory problem is a fault in the DIMM or in the memory controller on the
> motherboard?

I've wondered about that for a while now.  I've used various memory 
diagnostics on different machines over the years,  and basically they all 
seem to have in common that they write different patterns to memory and then 
read it back for comparison.  While this is okay as far as it goes,  how DO 
you deal with the situation you mention there?

Another one I ran into some years back (my first purchased 386 board actually) 
was what appeared to be a problem with cache.  I *still* have no idea whether 
the lockups I was seeing that went away when I disabled external cache were 
the fault of the cache ram or something on the MB,  and I've never run across 
anything that appeared to be capable of testing that function.

> > > Actually, there are some ISA boards I am still looking for. Top of the
> > > list is an origianl IB< PGC.
> >
> > I don't know what that is. I have a bag of ISA kit: mostly multi-I/O
>
> PGC = Professional Graphics Controller. An IBM board set (3 boards
> fitting into 2 adjacent ISA slots (there's a memory PCB sandwiched
> between them) that form an intellegent-ish graphics card with an 8088 to
> control it (!). I have the techref, I'd love to play with the boards.

Ah.  I was wondering about that too.  If you'd said "PGA" I would've had a 
clue right off.

-- 
Member of the toughest, meanest, deadliest, most unrelenting -- and
ablest -- form of life in this section of space,  a critter that can
be killed but can't be tamed.  --Robert A. Heinlein, "The Puppet Masters"
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Information is more dangerous than cannon to a society ruled by lies. --James 
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