Gidday Everyone,

Just wanted to share with you my relief after six months of pulling my
hair out.

I'd been receiving 100+ CRC errors on a 2mb download and a CPS rate of
sub 1500.  A typical download would often take twice the estimated time
given for the DCE speed and protocol.

With my software (Cooee under Win3.11) and modem (Avtek 288
v.34) both set for CTS/RTS flow control, and a new enhanced IDE
controller card with 16550af UART's bufferring enabled I had no idea
what was wrong.

The other day I stumbled on a solution.  Downloading to a hard drive
that was not formatted using driver software.

When I bought my new 1GB HDD the sales rep formatted it on a system
with LBA enabled.  Though my system has a 1992 BIOS without LBA, he
assured me it will still work.  After a month of surfing, BBSing, and
trouble free downloading with 3000+ CPS rates the drive finally
crashed.  (I recall it happened around the 500MB capacity region.)

I then reformatted it with the supplied "Ontrack Disk Manager" software
which left behind a Dynamic Drive Overlay (don't ask me) which is
enabled on boot-up (I assume this is some sort of driver that enables
the system to access the HDD above 500mb).  Ever since then I have had
the dreaded problems with CRC errors and shocking CPS rates.

The other day, with the comms program running on the 1GB drive, I
changed the download directory to an old 120MB HD.  Would you believe
it!  On the same 2mb download the CPS rate began at 3900+ and dropped
back to an acceptable 3300-3500, with 2 initial CRC errors.

I don't know what made the difference but I'm releived.  From what I've
read here and elsewhere perhaps the Dynamic Drive Overlay slows my
system down just enough to lose incoming data from the UART buffer.

Thanks to Gary Laming, Tom Przeor, and Russell Brooks for replying to
my initial post on this problem about 3 months back.

Hope this may be of help to somone else.

Regards,
Paul Chapman.
paul4deb{at}ozemail.com.au
___
 X OLX 2.1 TD X If this were an actual tagline, it would be funny.

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