Date: Fri, 24 Mar 95 10:03:19 EST From: "Elwood C. Downey" Mark Purcell, m.purcell@pos.apana.org.au, writes: > In the past I have had a browse through and even downloaded a couple > of ROMPAQS, but could never successfully install them. > > Could someone please give a quick rundown on the installation > procedure for the ROMPAQS. I have found that each SP****.EXE is generally accompanied with a corresponding SP****.DOC file with some basic info and instructions. I have found they are all the same though really: 1) get the .exe onto your system somehow 2) execute it and follow the instructions They generally ask you to stick in a scratch floppy and reboot. I appreciate that they generally store the previous/old contents of what they are replacing back onto the same floppy so you can roll back if you want to later. > My second question is how do you tell what you have now and what > you need to upgrade? Probably the easiest way to tell what you have now is to run the Compaq Control Center and then select Computer Setup. You will get a little display of all the major subsystems and their rev levels and other details. You can also get this and more from the stuff on the diagnostics/setup partition. I tossed this partition when I upgraded my hard disk to 353MB and I can not recall exactly how to boot from it but I think you just mess with the keyboard during the early boot phase to cause a keyboard error and then you are given a little menu of whether to boot diagntistics or normally. Maybe someone has a more politically correct procedure and can jump in for me. If you ever do boot your setup partition, I highly recommend making three floppies while you are there: 1) setup 2) diagnostics 3) minimal boot floppy (format a:/s) with goodies like format and fdisk. There's a little menu to guide you though the first two. These have helped me several times straighten things out such as for the new disk and when I installed Linux. As to what to upgrade, that is a big matter of guessing! I tend to pick updates that are a few months old and that have not been superceded for a few months. The idea is to find things that give the appearance of some stability. > I currently am running a Practical Peripherials 14.4k PCMCIA modem > which card services successfully reconises, but won't > automatically configure. (I have to disable card services to > initialise with the PPI custom software). Maybe if I upgrade my > PCMCIA drivers the modem would be automatically configured by card > services? But I really don't know which ROMPAQ does what I need . No ideas there. I bought Compaq's PCMCIA modem just so I would not have any compatability hassles and sure enough it works fine. Elwood ====================== Elwood Downey, ecdowney@noao.edu ======================= ==== Happiness is astronomical computing. ==== ==== ==== ==== Tried xephem, my interactive astronomical ephemeris for X/Motif? Get ==== ==== ftp://iraf.noao.edu/contrib/xephem/xephem_2.6/xephem_2.6.tar.Z or see ==== ==== http://iraf.noao.edu/~ecdowney/xephem.html. ==== ==== ==== ==== And check out the telescope at http://inferno.physics.uiowa.edu. ====