Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!decwrl!ucbvax!agate!tornado.Berkeley.EDU!vincelee
From: vincelee@tornado.Berkeley.EDU (Vincent H. Lee)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.tech
Subject: Re: Slowest Amiga
Message-ID: <1990Jul3.080401.10168@agate.berkeley.edu>
Date: 3 Jul 90 08:04:01 GMT
References: <10516@chaph.usc.edu>
Sender: usenet@agate.berkeley.edu (USENET Administrator;;;;ZU44)
Reply-To: vincelee@tornado.Berkeley.EDU (Vincent H. Lee)
Organization: ucb
Lines: 28

In article <10516@chaph.usc.edu> aliu@aludra.usc.edu (Alex Liu) writes:
>Oh BTW, after a few hours, the machine would vomit and explode
>and Frances refuses to work... until the next few hours...
>Heat?   Well we have every fan in the house blowing..
>
>Any help?>
>
>-Viet

After putting my lucas/frances in my 500, I found lots of flakey behavior too.
It also crashed after running awhile.  I thought that it was heat too.  What
it really seems to have been was noise.  It seems the ram controller resides
on top of the a500 ram chips, and the former doesn't like the latter.  I did
the following fix:

1) cut a small square of copper clad board (about 4" sq).
2) insulate one side with electrical tape
3) place the copper board under the controller chip and neighboring circuitry
   with the taped side towards the frances board
4) solder small lengths of wires from the edges of copper board to ground
   points on the frances board.

Anyway, sorry to be so simplistic, but the above fix worked wonderously for me.
My machine used to crash constantly.  Now it never does!

Hope this helps.

-Vince