tponsford wrote: snip I've discussed this with a reseller friend before. He doesn't deal in Alphas, but we've both noticed this for a couple of years, at least. He figures that the 255s are deployed in some environments where certifying new hardware would cost a lot more than paying silly prices for replacement-in-kind. We've all seen that sort of thing, so although it's just a guess, it makes sense. Doc

At 6:01 PM -0700 3/24/07, tponsford wrote: Having purchased an AlphaStation 500/333 from Compaq years ago, and owning a couple XP1000's (is this what you mean by Digital Workstations), I might be able to answer a couple of these questions. The AlphaStation 500 is a major pain, it uses memory that in its day was frighteningly expensive. As a result my 500/333 was probably the largest waste of money of *ANY* computer I've ever purchased. My 500/333 only has 96Mb RAM, and shortly after I bought it, I was able to buy my PWS 433au with more RAM for about what more RAM for the AS500 would have cost me. The AS500 is why I always recommend people pay *CLOSE* attention to what RAM a system uses and how much it has. The AS200's and I believe the 250/255's use standard 72-pin Parity SIMM's. The DEC PWS's can use PC100 Parity DIMM's. BTW, in spite of what the spec's say, at least the AS200/233 can use 128MB SIMM's, which will take it up to 768MB RAM. This means it can actually have more RAM than the lower two models of AS500, and almost as much as a PWS. IIRC, RAM in a PWS can be a bit strange, while you might have 1.5GB in one, VMS is only going to see 1GB. I'm not sure quite what the Spec is on the XP1000, but someone gave me some parity DIMM's 2GB, it might sound like a lot, but I'm sitting at 59% used right now, and if I was to fire up Mozilla, it would be a lot closer to 100%. But then I'm also running a bunch of stuff the typical home user might not bother with. The problem with the XP1000 shows up if you want to run OpenVMS 8.3, when it boots it flashes an error that says you need to update your SRM, and you can't. However, to the best of my knowledge it will work without any problem (so far I've only been running 8.3 since last Thursday night). There are also issues if you want to put a Fibre card in them (I don't have one, but IIRC, it's something along the lines of you need to configure the card in a different system). Darn, $200 isn't enough to get me to part with my pair of AS200 4/233's. Mine are a pair of the "OnSale Alpha's" and I still have the original boxes in pristine condition up in storage. I just need to remember what I did with the manuals and the PCMCIA cards that I pulled. I used one for OpenVMS, the other for OpenBSD. I actually purchased a 3rd, but it was for a friend who sold it years ago when he upgraded. The systems that I'm noticing on eBay that are *VERY* interesting are the ES40's that are only about $500. If I had a place to put one, I'd be buying one. As I'm running an XP1000/667 as my primary, and an XP1000/500 as my test box, my next upgrade is going to have to be something along the lines of a DS15 or a Dual CPU DS20/ES40 or something better. This assumes I don't simply move to Itanium 2, however, the Itanium 2 systems are a bit to expensive still, and probably will be for at least 5-6 years. Personally if I was to guess why an AS200 would go for a nice chunk of change, at least to a home user I'd suspect it is a combination of 2 PCI slots (this translates to a video card and either upgraded ethernet or SCSI), it will take a nice chunk of RAM, and it fits in a fairly small space. I've actually been threatening for over a year to set one of mine up as a simple workstation. Zane -- | Zane H. Healy | UNIX Systems Administrator | | healyzh at aracnet.com (primary) | OpenVMS Enthusiast | | MONK::HEALYZH (DECnet) | Classic Computer Collector | +----------------------------------+----------------------------+ | Empire of the Petal Throne and Traveller Role Playing, | | PDP-10 Emulation and Zane's Computer Museum. | | http://www.aracnet.com/~healyzh/ |