Reply to post: That reminds me of...

OK brainiacs, we've got an IT cold case for you: Fatal disk errors on an Amiga 4000 with 600MB external SCSI unless the clock app is... just so

Kevin Fairhurst

That reminds me of...

I had an Amiga 500 with a trap-door memory card upgrade to bring it up to a whopping 1MB of RAM... I took the machine apart to cut a trace on the motherboard & solder two other pads together to enable this to be seen as "chip" memory rather than "fast" memory, and after putting it all back together was surprised that it seemed to be working! (I must have been 14yo and had my parents known I'd done something like this I'm sure I would have been in big trouble!)

After a short time I started experiencing random crashes. I couldn't pin it down exactly but they became more frequent when my dad was doing his chair aerobics in the next room (which was the style at the time), or if the washing machine was on. I simply couldn't understand why the noise of something like this could cause the crashes...

And then I realised that the memory card wasn't seated properly. You needed to push it in with so much force you thought you were going to snap it, and then a little bit harder than that, for it to really push home. Although it seemed to work without being fully pushed home, the vibrations coming through the floor were just enough to cause the card to disconnect at some point, causing the crash. Thankfully it wasn't as a result of my cack-handed attempts at soldering ;)

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