CompuServe Messages

I know the Amiga-cultists will cause lightening to strike me if I ever even intimate that the Amiga may be less than perfect. So instead, let me tell you about some really neat undocumented features pertinent to the Amiga that you won't find on any of those other machines that lesser souls buy by the millions. Seems the Amiga is finicky about what kind of IDE HD you hook up to it. Isn't that groovy? I can put any drive into my Intel or Mac PC's and those silly machines just let you do it – but not the ever-so-sophisticated and packed-with-great-features Amiga. I installed two new Maxtor MXT-540 IDE drives today in an effort to get away from the We-Won't-Do-No-ColdBoot feature of the Amiga running with the Seagate 3390's I installed a few weeks back. (Another great Amiga feature I've discovered is that there is no technical support from Commodore. Cool! Sure wish those "idiots" who use Intel and Mac's could enjoy this sophisticated feature!) Installation went just fine. No ability to cold boot from the HD, of course, because that doesn't seem to be an Amiga feature. (Incidentally, am I the only one to notice that none of the people who were attacking me for "bashing" the Amiga came up with a solution to my inability to cold boot with the Seagate drives?) Then when I went to install Video Toaster, it stalled repeatedly on Disk 9 with a "Error Creating Toaster/Lightwave" message and the install aborted. A NewTek technician had the answer handy: the Maxtor's are on a list of "not recommended" drives from Commodore. Wow! To think of all the years I've wasted shoving drives into Intel and Mac boxes, never having to worry about whether a drive was "not recommended" by the computer manufacturer. (According to this source, there are precisely four drives "recommended" by Commodore, none larger than 120Meg. – and the list is not public.) The NewTek folks gave me a new string to insert in the "MaxTransfer" box under advanced options. It didn't work. And the Amiga manual, of course, just like the machine itself, is vastly superior to any of those other machines. Why just look at this stunning piece of elucidation about MaxTransfer: "Displays the hex number that determines the maximum number of bytes to moved during each DMA transfer". Why that explains everything! How come I never get to have so much fun on machines so vastly inferior to the Amiga? The drives work fine in the Intel box: took only a few minutes to install, format and initialize them. Not nearly as sophisticated as the Amiga, but what the heck: they work – running that stinky old MS-DOS some Amigans claim is the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. Finally, Maxtor – like Seagate – knows nothing about Amiga-specific problems. Now I know the cultists are going to come after me again, telling me that I am "bashing" the object of their worship. And you know what? I don't care. All I want is the assistance of the more rational and emotionally mature Amiga owners who might know how to bring up the Maxtor MXT-540's on the Amiga 4000 at an acceptable transfer rate – instead of telling me how wrong I am to be frustrated with the Amiga and how I fail to truly appreciate the inate superiority of the Amiga. The help of those who can understand my frustration with the Amiga will be greatly appreciated. It's difficult to believe that in 1993 there is still a computer out there that is fussy over what kind of current production hard drive you put into it. And this computer is made by a company that provides virtually no technical support. I hate to tell 'em, but the Homebrew Computer Club went south almost 15 years ago.