[SPARCbook] Sparcbook experiences from new list member

[Julian Coleman]

Hi,

> There are two screws on the external battery pack, underneath the upper side 
> sticker. If you unfasten these and take care of the plastic clips on the back side, 
> the battery's case should easily "split up" in two halves.

Thanks for that - I should have guessed straight away to take off the sticker
- it seems common to put screws underneath them ;-)

>                                   If you're unfortunate, the external battery fried 
> some of the 3GX's switching mosfets, as it did with mine. 

When I plug in the AC adapter to the external battery pack, the adapter LED
dims and brightens repeatedly, so I assume the fault is with the battery
pack.  I hope it hasn't fried the MOSFET's too.  If so, I will be tempted
by one of the 3TX boards.

> I've been thinking of this as well, but I'm happy now with an 8GB
> Toshiba drive.

I have an IBM 6GB disk in at the moment.  The CF idea was mainly to see
what that would do for battery life.

> Mine negotiates 5MB/s synchronous.
> I'm sure a decent CF card can keep up with that at least when reading.

Same here.  However, I can't get more than roughly 2MB/s from the raw disk
with dd.  I'm not sure if that's disk, adapter or controller though.  The
card I was looking at is 133x (19.5MB/s), although I don't know what the
real read/write speed will be.

Thanks,

J

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