M@ilbox

Noisy hard drives
Hi Matt, just read the article on Tim's Atari MIDI tool box and your comments on noisy hard drives. I have a tower system with 1 gig of memory which I use for archiving and non MIDI work, and it's noisier than my Mac  with its external drive! My main studio computer is a 4 meg STE connected to a Syquest EZ135 drive. This one is just about silent, only making small "chirrup" noises when actually reading and writing to disk. Perfect for studio work, and quite cheap s/h (if you can find one-I'm looking for a back up).

David Etheridge

Atari 520STFM memory upgrade
i have just got a atari st520-fm and i need to upgrade it to 1 mb, could you tell me if it is easy to do or would i need someone with the know how? if i do need to get someone to do it, how much would it cost? many thanks

tony

Shiuming Lai replies
For the effort involved in upgrading an STFM to any memory capacity, many users tend to plan ahead and take the long-term cost effectiveness route of going the full 4 MB. There's no harm in having more memory and it's better to have one operation than two, when you later find 1 MB once again becomes a limitation. Atari Workshop in the UK manufactures the well regarded Marpet RAM expansion kits for the STFM, call 01344 890008 or visit the web site at http://www.atari-workshop.co.uk for further details. The 4 MB kit uses SIPP modules permanently soldered to the daughterboard, for maximum reliability. As I recall, the kit requires minimal soldering to fit, and I'm confident that anyone with good basic electronics and assembly skills can successfully tackle the upgrade.

The link is: http://www.myatari.org/files/apr2003.zip

Peter Eriksson
Finland

Shiuming Lai replies
Thanks for notifying us, we're already aware of this. Back issue archives are stored on our mirror domain, which was in renewal, as the ISP didn't pre-warn us of its expiry in the usual manner. It's now back up and running.

MyAtari magazine - M@ilbox, June 2003