I can't guarantee I'll always do this, plus it makes me look like a deeply sad geek, with nothing better to do at almost 1am than help a gadget freak in pain :)

Hang on, maybe I am... ;)

Hugo

TFabris said:

"I don't care what anyone says about features, bugs, price, capacity, sound quality, whatever. There is nothing, nothing that beats this kind of customer service and dedication. You can't put a price tag on that."

I agree wholeheartedly.

You guys at empeg are wonderful!

That said, Rob -- is my warranty still intact?

;-)

- Jon

Empeg is also lucky to have a Tony Fabris out there as well. Kudos.

Calvin

Empeg is also lucky to have a Tony Fabris out there as well. Kudos.

Aw, shucks.
(He says as his head grows even bigger.)

For what it's worth, it's my fault for giving out my phone number to another BBSer. I should have known better. And from the looks of it, I gave him incorrect guidance anyway- it wasn't a loose cable so it was a waste of time to have him open the player.

___________
Tony Fabris

Tony,

Hehe... ok, I will dispose of your number... or use email in the future...

Next time you are in the Bay area, I owe you lunch/dinner/a place to stay/etc.

- Thanx again!
- Jon

Hehe... ok, I will dispose of your number... or use email in the future...

No, no, I was just joking. I didn't mind the call and I was glad to help, such as it was.

Next time you are in the Bay area, I owe you lunch/dinner/a place to stay/etc.

Watch out, I'll take you up on that. Will you babysit our 6-year-old while my wife and I head off to Cobb's?

___________
Tony Fabris

"No, no, I was just joking. I didn't mind the call and I was glad to help, such as it was."

Ok, I'm keeping the number! ;-)

"Watch out, I'll take you up on that. Will you babysit our 6-year-old while my wife and I head off to Cobb's?"

Actually, sure! I'd love to. Seriously.

Call me when you are planning it. There's a cool ice cream parlor in my hood that she'd love.

- Jon

Hm. Looks as though I may have a memory proble after all...

Here's the result of my Control-T test. (I think this only works with the developers code loaded...)

empeg-car bootstrap v1.00 20000601 (hugo@empeg.com)
If there is anyone present who wants to upgrade the flash, let them speak now,
or forever hold their peace...
0000 empeg-car board test version 0.04
0100 ram test starting
0110 testing ic 1 (0-3mb, low word)
0120 testing ic 2 (0-3mb, high word)
0130 testing ic 3 (4-7mb, low word)
0140 testing ic 4 (4-7mb, high word)
0150 testing ic 19 (8-11mb, low word)
0160 testing ic 32 (8-11mb, high word)
0101 memory error at d01408c0 (00000000!=00000000)
01f0 ram test done
0200 ide detect
0210 command issued
0220 drive id IBM-DARA-218000
02f0 ide ok
0300 dsp/i2c test
03f0 dsp/i2c ok
0400 temperature detect
0410 temperature is 46
04f0 temperature ok
0500 usb detect
0510 usb rev 1012
05f0 usb ok
0600 ethernet detect
0610 ethernet rev 334b
06f0 ethernet ok
0700 cs4231 detect
0710 cs4231 rev a0
07f0 cs4231 ok
00f0 tests complete

- Jon

Hehe, while your up, can you do anything to get mine shipped out and through customs a little quicker ;-)

Seriously, great support job guys!

-Mike

0101 memory error at d01408c0 (00000000!=00000000)

A certain anonymous BBS user ICQ'd me to suggest that the partition corruption may have been caused by faulty RAM, and that time would tell. If desired, he may now chime in here with an "I told you so".

___________
Tony Fabris

Actually, the other dead RAM victim was me, and yes, it trashed all sorts of things.

Partitions wouldn't pump, weird chirps in the audio, interesting corruptions of filesystems, you name it.

Rest assured, Jon, that these guys will turn around the repair fast.

I even got the dead chip back taped to a note from Hugo.



-Zandr
Mk.I #150
Mk.II #39

I was thinking the same thing. I've had memory go bad before and corupt all kinds of fun things in windows.

Sean

> That said, Rob -- is my warranty still intact?

That depends what kind of state your player is in when we get it back

Rob

(In other words, yes, if you didn't do anything horrible to it!)

weird chirps in the audio

That was my first symptom of bad RAM on my old computer... I thought it was my sound card, my ripper program, my encoder... I went nuts.... then about a week latter my NT partition went bye-bye and I figured out it was bad RAM.

I'll tell this tale so others can be forewarned.

I have a Slot-1 board and a Celeron - naturally I got a slocket board. The plan was that someday I'd get a Pentium III or similar that requires a Slot-1, but with the FP-PGA architecture who knows what's happening. Aaaaannyway,

After about three months performance had gradually degraded to the point where I was having to reboot once a day, often having it not POST afterward and requiring a complete power cycle. I sent it back, argued with the store, and eventually they replaced the motherboard and everything was fine again. Except the problems kept coming back. Over three months hangs would become more frequent, and though I'd reinstalled everything and done all sorts of crazy stuff to try and isolate the problem program nothing made sense. I sent it back again, had a larger hassle with them this time (of course, it never seems to show any problems for them...) and eventually got the motherboard replaced again.

Then a couple of chance conversations and little snippets gradually put the pieces in place. The slocket board contacts are tin, and the motherboard's are gold. This causes a electrical difference similar to the way a battery works, and causes the tin to oxidise. Oxidised contacts, bad electrical connection, signal failures and hangs. When they replaced the motherboard the slocket board was reseated and scraped away some of the oxidisation. Since then I've used a pencil eraser to scour the oxidisation off the tin and it's worked fine again.

So either don't get a slocket board or make sure the contacts are the same metal.

Paul

Save the whales. Feed the hungry. Free the mallocs.

Yah. Cheap Slotket=Bad voodoo. Burned once...ended up replacing MB too. Owch. There are some with gold contacts, which is what I have now & it's been running fine.

#335 18GB Green YUMMMMM......

Well, I sent my memory error ridden unit back to empeg for a look at it. Hugo thought that perhaps there was a problem with the "speed & timings of when certain ram access lines are asserted." So he made these changes. Got the unit back this morning, but once it got hot again, it started acting in the same manner. ARGH!

Now, I can't run emplode (it bombs every time it tries to check the drive integrity (and sends the player into a state where it dumps an indefinite stream of memory locations or something...)

Hoping to replace this unit next week with another one without this pesky problem...

Sigh... I will say that Rob and Hugo have been very good through this turbulent time. I'm sure that I have been a pest with a thousand emails... They have had the patience of saints...

- Jon

Im having the same problem you are. Did they test your player on their test rig of theirs at their manufacturer?

Sean

All players are tested on those rigs before dispatch. We don't usually test repaired players on them because the manufacturer is 150 miles away - in Jon's case, he very much wanted to get the player back for a trip at the weekend, and we had only 45 minutes to test it before our FedEx collection. Although it worked fine for that time, it wasn't long enough to properly determine whether the problem was fixed. We took a gamble on Jon's behalf to get the player back to him, with the agreement that we would send a replacement next week if this one still wasn't fixed.

I'm dissapointed that it didn't do the trick, but I think Hugo was on the right lines. He sent the software fix to another client with a similar problem, and although it didn't cure it, there was a great improvement. Hopefully it will just be a case of tweaking the timings a little more, so that the few players with a particularly unforgiving RAM chip will fall back into line.

Rob

The problem with your player is that whilst jbauer's fails the ramtest (well, we couldn't get it to fail in-house, but he's sent logs with a fail) yours doesn't; I'm working on a more thorough, looping ramtest that I can run for at least 8 hours. Out of the several hundred units, we've had 3 failed ram chips (out of 3000) identified at functional test stage (no problem), and what looks like 3 faulty units that have got to customers (big problem).

Unfortunately, it's a bit hard to soak test the units in production for 8 hours as this doesn't work with the production flow (they get a couple of hours testing) :(

Hugo

So... I was hoping to hear what your plans were for replacing my player.

I am hoping to get a bug free player this week, but I haven't gotten confirmation that this is the plan. Will someone at empeg please tell me that I will be taken care of? I've requested this a few times now, and have gotten no response.

I feel like a red-headed-stepchild when in fact, I have paid top dollar for a toy that DOES NOT WORK.

Can you guys confirm that I will get a new player this week?

I hate to have to resort to making this a public request, but have gotten no response privately, while you guys all continue to post notes publicly...

- Thanx
- Jon

Rob has already said he will ship you an advance replacement player (2 hours before your post I'm replying to!); this will go out the instant Fedex do their next pickup, which is Tuesday (ie, you should have it wednesday - monday is a public holiday in the UK).

Remember that we only heard confirmation from you that the software fix (which tested fine on your player when it was with us) didn't work for you after business hours yesterday - we can't work faster than that I'm afraid. I suspect you havn't had replies to emails as it's the weekend, and both myself & rob are on the bbs from home. Due to the VPN not being happy at the moment, we can't get to our empeg mailboxes from home.

Hugo

Thanx for responding Hugo. I asked for a response from someone as to the plan, and didn't hear anything back - either by direct email or on the BBS. This made me feel as if I wasn't being addressed.

Thank you for responding.

I look forward to getting a player that will work properly. I'm tired of these reboots. I've sat through hours of watching this player reboot uncontrollably, and it's gotten me very upset. I hope you can understand.

Ok, deep breath. Looking forward to Wednesday.

- Jon

Sorry for the problems; unfortunately, chips can be faulty and be hard to detect in production so we can't always catch everything. We'll get you a brand new player as soon as we can, and sorry for you being the slight "guinea pig" with the possible ram timings fix - but it's very hard to find problems when you can't replicate them in-house with all the necessary test gear at hand.

Hugo