Wednesday, December 2, 1998

Wednesday, December 2, 1998

• Protect your new components by using a power supply that will support all your new devices.  Those of you who are building a new system using a processor running at 100 MHz system bus, CD-ROM, floppy, LS-120, zip, large capacity hard drives or multiple hard drives, external SCSI devices, digital cameras, advanced sound systems, scanners, etc need to make sure that you have adequate power going to each device.   Minimum for 100 MHz motherboard, cpu, memory, one drive, floppy, and CD-ROM is a 250 watt ATX 2.01 compliant power supply.  If you add more devices of any type then you may need to go to a 300 watt power supply.  If your newly built system lockups or is unstable you might try a larger capacity power supply.

• Processor availability update:

Processor	Tray	Boxed
Intel Celeron 333 with 128K cache	available	available
Intel Pentium II 350	available	allocated backordered
Intel Pentium II 400	available	available
Intel Pentium II 450	available	allocated in stock
AMD K6-2/300	available	discontinued
AMD K6-2/333	available	allocated backordered
AMD K6-2/350	available	allocated backordered
AMD K6-2/366	available	to be released soon
AMD K6-2/380	available (limited)	to be released soon

• Al and Gracie wish you a Happy Holiday season.  When they walked around their neighborhood last evening, they noticed that Seasonal lights and decorations are everywhere.  We have a feeling that Al will decorate his doghouse tonight. 
• The technical support website is being rebuilt.  If you use some of the links for www.esc-ca.com you will receive errors.  However, www.esctechsite.com is now functional with the exception of any references to www.esc-ca.com   .  The main snag was the order status section.  This completely overworked the original intent and therefore we’ve redesigned the back end of the web.   Hopefully this should help everyone get updated information for RMA’s and New orders.
• The Chompers XT has hit the market.  It is the AMD K6-2 with an enhanced write allocate feature.  According to AMD, this improves performance by about seven (7) percent.  The motherboard BIOS must support the feature.   Award/Phoenix BIOS versions after October 5, 1998.  The AMI version must be 4.02 or later.
• The end of first quarter 1999 will be the release of the AMD processor code named Sharptooth.  Many trade magazines use the term AMD K6-3.   The official name has not been announced.  It will integrate 256 K of L2 cache onto the physical die.
• AMD will also release the AMD K6-2 running at 450 MHz.  Expect to see this the first quarter of 1999.
• First half of 1999 will be the release of the AMD K7.  This is a seventh generation processor from AMD.  It will use the “slot A” connector.   It is not electrically equivalent to the slot 1.  The 200 MHz system bus and 128 K L2 cache should help boost the performance.
• Epox updated their system BIOS for MVP3 motherboards.  The award flash utility is version 5.35A and the bin file is vp3080626.bin (11-26-98).  You may download both files from our FTP site.

Changes and updates include:

• The new BIOS will display an error message using NMI routing (ECC) if multi-bit memory errors detected. 
• Fixed compatibility with Linux shutdown procedure.
• Added support for AMD K6-2 400 & 450 display during boot.
• Turned on I/O port 92h bit 0 to support quick system reset.
• Fixed memory conflict issue with Matrox G200 and EICON DIVA PRO 2.0 PCI ISDN cards.
• Fixed reboot problem with Adaptec 2940 cards and USB keyboards.
• Fixed compatibility with EON Permedia 2 AGP cards.

• Update on the order status page.
  We have completed the bare necessities of the status page.  Many of you have asked what the problem was with the page, idea, etc.  Because orders are taken online, on the phone and fax — multiple people are keying in information.  However, the status database was built as a static standalone file.  Only one person had access to the database.  Worse, in trying to upload the datafile, there were problems.  If someone was accessing the database file then there was a lock and the upload would not complete.  The database is now available to numerous ESC employees with the proper passwords and user permissions.  They can then update information throughout the day.

We’ve also added one more feature – which we thought might help.   The tracking number is now linked to the UPS website.  You can click on the tracking number and the number is sent to the UPS site and the package is tracked.   No more re-keying or copy and pasting the tracking number.  We hope this saves some of you time.

Our next job is to add the invoice information online.   Therefore, the serial numbers of product will be readily available.  Quantum has placed a warranty database on their website.  By linking to their database you will be able to determine the status of your warranty.  Hopefully other companies will follow their lead.

If you have any other ideas – please speak up.  There are many ideas we have been ‘tossing’ around to upgrade the support website.

• YY Cases
  Many people have started to discover the benefits of the YY cases.  The most common question is a comparison of the YY to the Elan Vital case.  We will add a feature comparison to our website.  In the meantime, YY’s website has several photos.