Gord: I hope you don't mind me quoting your email about the new Sonnet card to a general notice to the LEM PCI group. Others will find it interesting, I'm sure.
Now that you mention it I do have a few things to say about the new 800 Mhz Sonnet Crescendo PCI processor upgrade card. I got the Sonnet card on Sept 13, about ten days ago. I put it into my old Daystar Genesis MP 800+. For the few apps I used that were MP aware, the 800 Mhz nPower daughter card with four 200 Mhz 604e processors was a blast. For anything else the Genesis, with its 50 Mhz Tsunami board, the same as the board in the 9500, was simply a 200 Mhz 604e Mac. The 604e is actually one of my all-time favourite Motorola processors. There's a lot right with that design. I had a few disconcerting moments within the first few days of the install. My Adobe installer CDs for Photoshop Elements 1.0 and Acrobat 5.0 REFUSED to run, claiming a problem reading from the installer disk....IO Error: (Bad Disk) ....and a request that I contact Adobe tech support. I tried that. Honest. As many of you may already know, to your eternal regret, it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than it is for one of us who are registered Adobe product users to contact Adobe Technical Support. They WILL NOT ANSWER THE PHONE for less than $20.00 U.S. and their FREE service program must be purchased in order to become active. Luckily I also posted a concern to Sonnet about this problem and asked if there had been any reports of failed installers after upgrading with the Crescendo 800 G4, and I included the error numbers and quoted the IO Error dialog box verbatim. Within a couple of hours a Sonnet tech person emailed me back with the suggestion that I should suspect the drive being copied to rather than the disk being read from. Installing a new OS 8.6 onto a fresh Quantum SCSI drive and re-running the Adobe installers proved that it was the hard drive that was causing the problem, not the upgrade card or the Adobe CDs. The Installation Manual is exactly that. Half an inch thick and NOTHING IN IT excep[t how to plug the Sonnet card into various Mac model motherboards. I'm sufficiently technical to crave what was completely omitted: technical information or even propaganda from Sonnet and or Motorola about the new Apollo 6 Rev 2.1 SOI G4 MPC 7455 processor used by Sonnet for their serious upgrade cards. Another thing......EVERYTHING happens REALLY FAST. Mike Gordon Hawley wrote: > Hello Michael: > > I see from the PCI-PowerMacs list that you recently added this upgrade to > your Power Mac. Which model of Mac did you upgrade? How do you like the > new speed? Any problems to report? > > I would like to get one of these upgrades for my 8500, but am just keeping > an eye out for potential issues right now. I will probably update in a > month or so. > > Thank you. > > Gordon Hawley -- PCI-PowerMacs is sponsored by <http://lowendmac.com/> and... Small Dog Electronics http://www.smalldog.com | Refurbished Drives | -- Sonnet & PowerLogix Upgrades - start at $169 | & CDRWs on Sale! | Support Low End Mac <http://lowendmac.com/lists/support.html> PCI-PowerMacs list info: <http://lowendmac.com/lists/pci-powermacs.shtml> --> AOL users, remove "mailto:"; Send list messages to: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To unsubscribe, email: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> For digest mode, email: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subscription questions: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Archive:<http://www.mail-archive.com/pci-powermacs%40mail.maclaunch.com/> Using a Mac? Free email & more at Applelinks! http://www.applelinks.com
