This is a gripe column this time. The Web Developer's Journal editors have been having a big time trying out sound boards, modems, printer enhancers and a few other hardware goodies like floptical drives and various SCSI devices for review. In general, this has been great. You, the reader, have requested articles about these types of peripherals and we, the editors, have been fighting Plug-and-Pray, interrupts, IRQ conflicts, DMAs, and memory addresses to keep you informed about latest and best peripherals. Although I love fiddling with hardware, I loathe sorting out hardware conflicts. All of us at WDJ are more than ready for Plug and Play that really works.
January 1997
Try to add more than one or two boards to your computer and I guarantee hours of fun fiddling with jumpers and running diagnostic programs. Even just adding a modem to a plain box freshly configured from the factory can cause conflicts with your mouse. Plug and Play certainly helps enormously but hardware upgrading is still far from easy. Fiddling with hardware add ons and peripherals has taught us a few things over the years and our hardware fiddling skills have been particularly fine tuned over the last couple of months. Here's a few rules we've learned:
RULE # 1 - No matter how smoothly everything seems to be working after installing a new piece of hardware DON'T PUT THE COVER BACK ON the computer for at least two days after everything seems to be working fine.
RULE #2 - Diagnostic programs that purport to identify the DMA channels, interrupts and memory addresses never see everything and often supply erroneous information. During a lengthy session with a tech support lady at one add-in board manufacturer I suggested running Microsoft MSD (diagnostics) on my system and faxing her the results so we could figure out where the conflicts were. This honest lady said I was quite welcome to do so but her experience was that 90% of the time MSD prints out exactly the same results no matter what computer it's run on, no matter what peripherals are attached. I checked this out myself over the next couple of weeks as I installed and removed a variety of boards-MSD usually returned similar erroneous information, no matter what I had on my system.
RULE # 3 - Tech support - when it's good it's very, very good but when it's bad it's horrid! I'm not going to worry about paying for tech support-it's a moot point now-just have your checkbook ready. Compaq wants a credit card number before they'll even let you state your problem. Sometimes, rarely, after hours of fruitless fiddling, you call tech support and they say something like "Oh, yeah. Just set the buffers to 20 and everything will run fine" and they're right-it works! Sometimes tech support hours are from 8 - 5 Monday through Friday and, guess what, you have a job and the computer you're getting ready to take the Big Hammer to is your home system. This situation really happened to one of our reviewers and he never did get the board to work. We had to reassign the review to another reviewer with more flexible hours.
Here's the tech support scenario at another company whose products are reviewed here: three days in a row I needed tech support and called each morning at about 9:30 their time. The lady that answered the tech support number dropped the phone when she picked it up (two days in a row) and answered in a slow muffled voice "Hello?" No snappy "XYZ Corp, this is Susie, may I help you?" This lady sounded like she had been up all night and her second cup of coffee probably wasn't going to help much. "Well, there's no one here to help right now but I can probably get someone to call you back." A tech support person did call back each day within a couple of hours but the first day, after hearing my problem, the tech support person said "just re-install the software - you must have done something wrong" and hung up! Really! This is one of the major digitizer manufacturers-a big presence in the market and not a free call.
RULE # 4 - RTFMS - I'm the kind of guy that like's my manuals big and strong. I'm one of those people that actually read them (sometimes). And I trust them - after all this is the written word. Usually the manuals will help you with your installation problems - usually. Recently I spent two sessions of 4 to 6 hours each trying to install an internal optical device. I spent hours carefully studying the manual and painstakingly trying out each possible jumper setting combination rebooting after each adjustment (I had to pull the board out each time in order to reach the jumpers). Finally I gave up and called tech support. This was one of those times when tech support had a quick, snappy answer that fixed me up in a hurry: "Oh, yeah, there's a typo in the manual on the diagram for the jumper settings. The pins are numbered wrong in the drawing." Great! He had me up and running in 5 minutes. So RTFMS????
If you follow these simple rules your hardware installation should go quite smoothly every time. Just kidding. How bad can it get? After days of trying to get a specialty printer board to work, the manufacturer finally told me to take all the other boards out of my system and leave them out. That was the only way I was going to be able to use their product. What? No modem? No CD? No scanner? Is it Plug and Play yet? I don't think so. Sound boards are notoriously hard to get going. I've seen figures as high as 40% returns for sound boards that couldn't be made to run - nothing wrong with the boards, they just couldn't be configured in the customer's computer over the phone. One of our editors spent three weeks and three returned boards trying to make his computer burp and whistle and sing songs. So he was really cheesed off when I related my experience with an Orchid SoundWave 32. This is a nice soundboard that comes with several modules and add-ons and uses up several IRQs and hogs multiple memory addresses and it installed without a hitch. I took it out of the box, put it in the slot, turned on my computer, loaded the software, and my system's been burping and playing inane midi files ever since. At the time I put the board in my system I already had a scanner, Syquest floptical, printer enhancer, modem, digitizer, CD and a couple of other hardware goodies so I should have had several days of fun configuring this new board to coexist peacefully with my already installed menagerie. As I write, everything's been running peacefully for a month but I still haven't put the cover back on, just in case.
