🚀 go-pugleaf

Anyone out there want to answer a few questions for me?

I have a good old government issue Z-248 that I am beginning to get
sick of and thought I would ask around and see how other folks feel
about their machines before I dump mine.

I have spent a fair amount of time working with Zeniths and have
always had problems with the serial hardware.  I have never been able
to convince myself that the serial ports were worth a damn.

My favorite gripe is the COM3 boondoggle that Zenith perpetrated on
the government - the machine had to have 2 serial ports so Zenith
provided COM1 and LPT1 on one card and COM3 and LPT2 on another card.
Sounded great except for no one I know of has ever been able to get
the COM3 port to work.  Of course Zenith was more than happy to sell
the govt. a COM2 card for about $30.00 which seemed pretty reasonable
until you got the COM2 and noticed that it had a chip count of about 2
and must have cost Zenith a whole $5.00 to make. Most of the folks I
worked with when I was with the Navy just pulled the COM3/LPT2 to save
real estate and BTUs.  Has anyone ever been able to get COM3 to work?

COM1 was no work of art either.  I never could get the FOSSIL serial
drivers to work nor could I get any of the SLIP packet drivers for the
ka9q package to work.  I also had more than one occasion when code
that ran absolutely fine on the serial ports of a true blue IBM AT
crashed and burned on the Z-248.  One problem was so bad my former
boss shipped a Z-248 to a vendor so that they could figure out what
the heck was busted and fix it- I have not heard if the problem ever
got fixed. Has anyone else had serial problems like this?  Anyone find
a way to fix them?  Anyone using the new NS serial chips in a Z-248?

I also had similar problems with Ethernet cards.  Cards and drivers
that worked fine in the old TB IBM AT were strictly crash city on the
Z-248.

Now for disks...  I had a very nice Fujitsu 327MB SCSI disk that came
with a host adaptor.  Worked AOK on a true blue IBM AT.  Of course on
the Zenith it was cold boot time as soon as the machine woke up and
saw the SCSI host adaptor.  Anyone else out there using any SCSI
devices on a Z-248?  I would really like to get a SCSI host adaptor and
a CDROM unit that I can use on my Zenith so that I can use the MS
Bookshelf but I am not about to shell out a kilobuck for the drive,
controller, and disk only to have the Zenith live up to its old
reputation.  So can anyone tell me this will work?

I also had lots of fun getting my Zenith to get along nicely with a
telebit tb+.  I can't prove that my touble was with the Zenith as
tb+'s are a bit flakey but with the Z-248's history of being "sorta AT
compatible" I blamed the trouble on the Z-248.  Maybe I am being a bit
hard on the Z-248 but it was brought to us by those wonderful folks at
Heath/Zenith who also were responsible for the WWV receiver that was
"almost RS232 compatible".

While I am bothering you all... Has anyone used Zenith's MS-DOS 3.3+?
Is it worth the price? (I seem to recall being quoted $149.00 for it
since I did not send in $49.00 upgrade offer card that Zenith
supposedly sent me in March but that I, of course, never received.)

Has anyone been tracking the ROM releases?  I stopped wasting my time
after about 4 replacements with no noticable improvements.

So what do you all think?  Is my Z-248 about ready to become a
doorstop?  Has anyone else had this much "fun" with there Z-248s.

I am really beginning to think that it is time to pitch the Z-248 and
hope that I have been a good enough boy this year that Santa will
bring me a SPARCstationI for Xmas (or least a 386i) and I will be able
to put my Zenith out of my misery as all it is good for is to run
Telix so I can log into a computer that works.

Any and all flames, sympathy notes, hints, RTFM's, or whatever will be
appreciated.

        Tim Smith - Technical Consultant
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