My first impressions of the Pegasos II (review) - UPDATE!

[Damion]

@takemehomegrandma

Thanks for the well-written and balanced review.

My experience seems to mirror yours almost exactly; the biggest setbacks
were related to the documentation, everything else was/has been remarkably
smooth. The instructions in the smaller manual did not work as written to
boot the system, but the directions in the larger German book and at
morphos-news.de are correct.

There are only two exceptions: I don't seem to be experiencing neither clock,
nor the lack of drive detection at cold boot problems. :-? I wonder what the
Pegasos firmware performs differently at resets, as the startup speeds between
"cold" boot and reset is identical. Perhaps the current firmware probes
the IDE chain before some drives are ready for operation? Now how ironic
would that be...;-)

While we are at this subject...I think it would be a nice implementation on
future boards, if the results of the initial device probe/init by the open
firmware could be stored in some type of temporary buffer space, so that
reboot speeds could be drastically improved. It's a real shame for an OS
which takes 4 seconds to load...to be held up by something which really
should only occur once during the machines "on" time. I suppose with future
versions of the OS this may be less necessary, but it would really aid matters
during testing of all those old amiga apps, where constant reboots are the
norm...

Concerning the issue of added noise, I have no idea what brand, mounting, or
flow characteristics are assosiated with the fan on the G4 Pegasos cards
(mine is a G3), but here are some fans which may be easily fitted, and should
be much more quiet. Might affect warranty terms, but who cares about that? :-)

quiet fans

[Damion]

It seems that peg+MOS is still only for advanced users.

To a certain extent I agree, but not entirely. The setup
can be a bit tricky, but that's mainly due to *detail*
issues, and not really anything fundamental. Most of them
are fixed already. Setting up a PC from scratch can be
equally (or more!) unnerving.

On the software end the deficiencies are greater, the
biggest being the lack of a solid networking program and
office suite. But once again, this should be resolved
within the next few updates.
 
A member of my family was on the system earlier, and
after several hours of surfing and playing around on
the machine - with no crashes - he was quite impressed...
and that really goes to show how capable the Pegasos can
actually be for the "average" PC user...

Of course it crashes on me constantly, but that's becasue
I spend all my time trying to get old 68k CGX demos to
run...

[Damion]

I believe I read posts from someone other that does not have
these problems too. Perhaps it has to do with the models of IDE
devices being used or surch? Mine is a seagate barracuda hard drive
and a lite-on DVD player.

That sounds likely.

Or are you talking about probing/initializing hardware once on
cold boot, and then re-use that when reseting the computer?

Exactly! :-)

[Damion]

Funny, from his review it wouldn't pass my "Parents" test. Thus not ready for
prime time. Of course, Windows 98 didn't pass either and forget Linux. XP pass
with a satifactory grade. It's a hard test.

Argo I agree 100%.

[Damion]

Samsung is also manufacturing some killer drives these days,
I recently bought one, and am 'overall' more than satisfied.
It's probably not as quiet as the Barracudas during idle, but
they're definately faster...I'd say a solid middle ground between
the silence of "some" Barracudas, and the performance of a
WD/Hitatchi.

Article at StorageReview.com

Also, maybe of notable interest to some here, the Samsung uses a
Marvell hard disk controller...you can check that out here, and view
a picture of (most of) that chip "right here".

Piece,

-d