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From: carlson@gateway.mitre.org (Bruce Carlson)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc
Subject: Re: CompuAdd, PC Brand, any good?
Message-ID: <44886@linus.UUCP>
Date: 14 Feb 89 18:55:00 GMT
References: <8000037@m.cs.uiuc.edu>
Sender: news@linus.UUCP
Reply-To: carlson@gateway.mitre.org (Bruce Carlson)
Organization: The Mitre Corporation
Lines: 40

In article <8000037@m.cs.uiuc.edu> jng@m.cs.uiuc.edu writes:
>
>Anybody out in the Netland has experience on the following machines:
>1) CompuAdd 286/16
>2) CompuAdd 286/12
>3) PC Brand 286/12
>What I am interested are their compatibility, reliability? Is it wise to
>own one of these machine? Can they all run OS/2 giving enough RAM, the 286/16
>can have Max. of 5 Mb on motherboard, while the 12MHz need expansion boards
>for more than 1 MB RAM, will that affect the performance of OS/2? or OS/2
>just done recognized the expanded memory?

PC World did a comparison of OS-2 compatibility and performance a few months
ago and I thought the speed results were interesting.  In general the 10 Mhz
compatibles were slower than the 12 Mhz compatibles, with two exceptions 
being the AST Premium 286 and one of the IBM PS-2 models (model 60?).
I will ignore the PS-2 because I don't remember the details of its 
configuration. 
The reason for the AST's speed with OS-2 (it beat the 12 Mhz machines) appeared
to be because it could access up to 4 Mbytes of memory at 10 Mhz with no
wait states.  Most of the other machines could use 1-2 Mbytes with no wait
states and the rest of memory was on expansion cards, with wait states.
I think that the OS-2 tests needed about 3 Mbytes of memory, so many of the
"fast" machines were slowed down by accessing memory with wait states.

>
>Also any comment on both Companies is appreciated.
>
I ordered some small items (switch box, keyboard drawer, etc) and 
software from CompuAdd and everything came through as promised.  I even
returned one item and although they never acknowledged getting the item
back (I had called for a return authorization number) the credit appeared on
my Mastercard bill the next month.  CompuAdd's software prices are nothing
great, but they are very inexpensive for small hardware items.  My AB switch
only cost $13, compared to $30-50 from other places.
>Joseph Ng
>Department of Computer Science
>University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign
>ARPANET:jng@m.cs.uiuc.edu
>BITNET :jng%m.cs.uiuc.edu@uiucvmd.bitnet