CompuServe Thread

Progressive 040/25 $225 firm There's a bit of a story behind this board. I bought it awhile ago, used, from Joseph E. Hoh III of Kentucky who represented it to me as perfectly operational without a flaw on its shiny green surface except for working componants. At $425 plus shipping it seemed like a good deal, and he was in the forum with a corporate ID – Great American Insurance, which is apparently where he works – so I thought, OK, even though I didn't know him. The board did not turn out to work in my machine. I went up to my friend and dealer in CT – Bill Chadwick, Applied Multimedia, (203) 348-0108 for anyone needing a dealer in the Stamford area – and he sweated over the thing for an entire day. It still wouldn't work in my machine, and he had not other 3000s to test it in. The symptoms were as follows: the machine would boot up and loadwb, and then when I tried to run something, or after opening a few windows, or whatever, it would crash with "ramlib" or "WB_2.X" listed as the offending task. It would crash faster on the next bootup, and faster, and so on until only the insert Kickstart disk screen would appear. It seemed like a heat problem. So I sent the board back to Mr. Hoh, and he sent it to Expert Services, which is conveniently enough located close to him in Kentucky. They said it worked fine. So he sent it back to me, and I tried it again. This time I updated my setpatch, and seemed to have greater success, but I kept crashing every time I tried to load RetinaEmu, and then what once again appeared to be heat degredation set in. So I talked to Scott at Expert Services and he told me that the 3000 they'd run the board in had been doing rendering in Lightwave and all kinds of other big-boy tasks for upwards of 3 hours without so much as a hiccouph. The possibility exists that the problem lies somewhere in the intersection of page mode versus static column RAM, buggy Ramseys, and so on. I've learned a fair amount about 3000 hardware in the interim. In any case, I've already taken the big plunge and ordered a Warp Engine 3040, which costs a heck of a lot more, to say the least, than $425, so I'm trying to recoup whatever I possibly can. So here's the deal. If you want the board, you send me a check for $225 plus shipping. I let the check clear. Then I send you the board and copies of all the repair paperwork and so on. You have 1 week from receipt to see if the board works – after that, the money's mine. If you have problems, we can talk about extending the week to let you work on it, or you can send the board back to me, and if it's in the same condition in which I sent it to you, I'll refund your money. I can't afford to do anything differently than that. If somehow you get a working 040 board for $225, you're luckier than you have any right to be, and I make no long or short term warranties. This board is sold AS IS after the 1 week trial period. Now for the caveats. (Yes, there are still some.) The duplicitous Mr. Hoh confessed after he had my money and I had his board that he too had had the same kind of trouble I had until he took out the board's mounting screws, leading me to believe that there's a weak solder joint somewhere. I forgot to mention that when Bill and I were sweating over the board (figuratively speaking only, I assure you) we discovered that we could change the boot problems by changing the tightness of those screws – so deep, and the Kickstart screen, so deep and not enough ram to load, and so on. Also, when I got the board, one of the floppy power connectors on the edge of the board, used to power the fan mounted on the 040, was partially broken and came off completely during installation. It has since been soldered on firmly, by Bill, and has given me no trouble since in any of the dozen or so attempts I've made to install it. So there it is. I hope someone gets a cheap 040 and I get some money. Paul (aka Mr. Zombie)