Return Of The Flash - Wed 17/3

When I revived my Newtons, I made the foolish mistake of installing a 2 gbyte Compact Flash card as the default store in my "main" Newt. I partitioned it as 4 500 Mbyte stores and put different content in each one (apps in one, books in another etc) Everything started ok, but gradually things got slower and slower until they pretty much ground to a halt. Two things seemed to coincide - an increased use of Mail V, with a rather silly setup (multiple email accounts for a single owner slip) leading to lots of timeouts and reboots, and the 2010 problem making resetting the date and time every reboot both necessary and tedious. Add to that the 5 minutes between rebooting and the Newt becoming usable again and using the Newt was becoming a pain rather than a pleasure.

So, I admitted defeat, and went back to a trusty old 20mbyte card I had lying around. Suddenly restart times went from 5 minutes to 1 minute and fixing my Mail V setup to have separate owner slips for each email account dropped the number of timeouts and restarts. Joy to the world!

But I had got used to all that lovely space. I had no books on line any more. And then I started using PaperBoy for Usenet news, and suddenly needed space for articles.

Having bought the wrong kind of 32 mbyte Flash card, I decided to give Compact Flash another go. The reasoning being that the Newton wasn't really designed to have one 500 mbyte store, never mind four of them at the same time so it was a bit unreasonable to expect it to cope happily with that scenario. So, off to eBay I went and bought a job lot of old, small Compact Flash cards and installed a 32Mbyte card, partitioned into two 16 mbyte stores. So far, it has been working quite well - not as fast as linear Flash but not as horrific as the 2 gbyte card. Reboot time is more than the one minute with a 20 mbyte Flash card, but only about 1.5 - 2 minutes, and I have more packages installed. Who knows, I might get bold and try the 64 mbyte card that came in the lot at some point!