Products > Test Equipment
Old'ish vs New'ish test equipment
tggzzz:
--- Quote from: bdunham7 on February 05, 2023, 10:12:55 pm ---
--- Quote from: james_s on February 05, 2023, 09:10:14 pm ---Floppy disks still work fine, I use them with my scopes and logic analyzer, I have a USB floppy drive to transfer the data to a PC.
--- End quote ---
Very often the drives no longer work. Even my USB floppy drive has failed, the only one I have is a MAC one. And 1.44MB is pretty limiting...
--- End quote ---
I ought to check whether my 8" drive still works : )
The capacity limitation matched what people used them for. Of necessity :)
james_s:
I've never had one fail and they're still plentiful and easy to find. 1.44MB is limiting by modern standards but it's what these instruments were designed around at the time so it works fine for that. A disk will hold a few dozen screen captures.
You can get USB adapters to replace the floppy drive for those that prefer, but I don't mind using the floppies.
tautech:
--- Quote from: james_s on February 05, 2023, 09:10:14 pm ---I never liked PC based test gear in the first place but you can still use it the same as always, running the original OS and software that it came with.
--- End quote ---
Yet with cheap modern processors, RAM and SSD there's potential for really modern PC based gear to provide really fast boot times.
Modern PC's with an i5 or better can easy boot in 15s and no doubt much faster with a trimmed down OS.
bdunham7:
--- Quote from: Finderbinder on February 05, 2023, 09:05:45 pm ---As other person mentioned, there were hi end units based on PC (internally). Surely they would be appealing devices if not obsolete PC part. Or if PC part would be upgradeable ::) Looks like an easy task (as with most PSs) but... :horse: old horse refuses to run :-DD
--- End quote ---
There are cases where you can upgrade the PC part and still run the device, or update the display from CRT to LCD. However, other than HDD upgrades, you are usually better off just leaving them alone running their original operating system. DOS-based devices generally work great, early Windows versions can be annoying because of modern ideas about what acceptable boot times are.
nctnico:
--- Quote from: bdunham7 on February 05, 2023, 10:12:55 pm ---
--- Quote from: james_s on February 05, 2023, 09:10:14 pm ---Floppy disks still work fine, I use them with my scopes and logic analyzer, I have a USB floppy drive to transfer the data to a PC.
--- End quote ---
Very often the drives no longer work. Even my USB floppy drive has failed, the only one I have is a MAC one. And 1.44MB is pretty limiting...
--- End quote ---
Same here. IIRC I have tried 2 USB disk drives. One didn't work out of the box and the next one kind of works but often you need to format the disk in the drive on the test equipment to get the tracks in the proper position on the disk. But even then the drives in the test equipment can also be flaky. A disk-to-USB unit also turned out to be a turd.
Nowadays I'm using an ethernet GPIB adapter and some Python scripting. Even though the Python scripting takes a bit of work to setup, it is ready to go and works right out of the box every time.
--- Quote from: bdunham7 on February 05, 2023, 10:18:59 pm ---
--- Quote from: Finderbinder on February 05, 2023, 09:05:45 pm ---As other person mentioned, there were hi end units based on PC (internally). Surely they would be appealing devices if not obsolete PC part. Or if PC part would be upgradeable ::) Looks like an easy task (as with most PSs) but... :horse: old horse refuses to run :-DD
--- End quote ---
There are cases where you can upgrade the PC part and still run the device, or update the display from CRT to LCD. However, other than HDD upgrades, you are usually better off just leaving them alone running their original operating system. DOS-based devices generally work great, early Windows versions can be annoying because of modern ideas about what acceptable boot times are.
--- End quote ---
Agreed. Upgrading to the fastest processor and most memory the existing motherboard supports AND adding an SSD is the best course of action. Upgrading the motherboard and/or OS (which is more likely to be a downgrade) is asking for trouble. More often than not, you'll need special drivers. Some test equipment software doesn't even like multi-core / hyperthreading CPUs.
But this doesn't mean you can't get healthy speed upgrades. At some point I replaced a 468DX2 with a Pentium1 Overdrive that fitted in the same socket (socket 7 IIRC). That made the system fly because it did a lot of floating point calculations which is exactly what a Pentium is way better at than the regular 486.
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