Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!att!osu-cis!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!rutgers!ukma!david From: david@ms.uky.edu (David Herron -- One of the vertebrae) Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga Subject: Subsystem 500 - Product Review Message-ID: <10204@s.ms.uky.edu> Date: 2 Sep 88 15:37:51 GMT References: <1173@astroatc.UUCP> Reply-To: david@ms.uky.edu (David Herron -- One of the vertebrae) Organization: U of Kentucky, Mathematical Sciences Lines: 50 I recently told my mother to buy a Subsystem 500 for her machine and recently (last saturday) had a chance to look it over closely. The thing comes in a metal case that's made from two pieces of stamped & bent sheet metal. The two halves fit together fairly well, but it takes a certain amount of juggling to actually get them to fit together. Inside is the board. The connection to the external connector is made by mounting a little card on the main card, at a right angle, and putting an edge-card connector on the end of that. Here is the first construction problems. One is this fixed thing sitting there. In the A500 there are two screw holes, one on each side of the card edge, which look like one could screw down firmly whatever you attach at the card edge. They do not do this. The other problem is that this little card sitting up in the air is the ONLY thing keeping the A500 and the Subsystem together. But in normal use of a computer one is always sliding the keyboard around, resulting in the A500 and the Subsystem often getting out of alignment. I am a little bit afraid that if left alone there will be some sort of problem with static or whatever. I am intending to have Mom put some velcro down, or something, to help keep the two boxes 'together'. The main board doesn't really have any components on it (that I remember) and has two card edge connectors mounted on it. Very simple here and doubtlessly hard to screw up. One good point is that they left another edge card connector to pass the bus through. Internally there is a space to mount a 3.5 inch drive, in which they have mounted a floppy. The connection to the floppy is a ribbon cable arrangement which enters through a hole in the back of the box. They do not have anything to pass on the floppy connector. There is a little bit of dead space in the box which *might* be big enough for another floppy... The power supply is a seperate unit which has connectors for +5v, -5v, +12v and ground. The power cable provided only has two connectors on it and there aren't any instructions saying which power supply spots to hook the power cable to. In fact, my mother tells me that the documentation was basically non-existant... Oh well. In all, the product looks 'ok'. There are a couple of bugs, but they are minor. It is perhaps fortunate that most of my family is technically very literate and can handle little bugs like that in stride. -- <---- David Herron -- The E-Mail guy <---- ska: David le casse\*' {rutgers,uunet}!ukma!david, david@UKMA.BITNET <---- Problem: how to get people to call ...; Solution: Completely reconfigure <---- your mail system then leave for a weeks vacation when 90% done.