🚀 go-pugleaf

In message <ant311822868a*2k@whtng.demon.co.uk>
          Paul Whiting <paul@whtng.demon.co.uk> wrote:

> Forgive me for breaking the newbie six-month rule, but I have a rather
> pressing problem: my sister's A3010 is struggling on the Internet. She has
> 4MBytes RAM, 82MByte HD with 25MBytes free, ANT Internet suite 1.22,
> Dynalink 33600 voice/fax/data modem, Demon internet account, and 2 
> extension cables (3m and 15m) plugged into each other. The problem 
> specifically is grindingly slow access for the first few minutes of use,
> and then stationary access. There are a great many (about 3-5 per second)
> 'Bad FCS on frame count...' errors in the logging window at this stage.

Sounds like the old unbuffered serial port problem.

> With the RPC, Internet access is fine.

That's because the RPC has a FIFO buffer on the serial UART.

> I realise that replacing the A3010 would be a good idea - I daily plead with
> my sister to get herself an A7000+ - but she will not spend a farthing.

An ARM3-equipped A440 with an Atomwide sp_dual card would work.

> I would be eternally grateful to any kind souls who can suggest a workable
> (and preferably cheap) solution.

If the A3010 has a multiscan monitor, try changing to mode 0. Of course, that
makes WWW browsing a little difficult, but mode 12 might leave enough spare
bandwidth.

A possible solution is this - if you're both using the same ISP, get a couple
of Ethernet cards and run a proxy server on the RPC. Then run ArcWeb on the
A3010 with proxying enabled via the RPC.

I've tried that, and it's still slow. But it doesn't lose data.

About the only thing you can do is let your sister use your RPC for Internet,
as the A3010 is just not powerful enough.

-- 
Glenn Richards      glenn@squirrel-net.demon.co.uk
Squirrel Solutions  Acorn comms/networking specialists
                    http://www.squirrel-net.demon.co.uk/