the unit is fine and the supplied serial cable is fine, however the upgrade utility runing on Win 2000 is NOT fine.

Are you sure that the serial port is even functioning on that Win2000 machine? Maybe it's not the software's fault. What else have you got which uses that serial port, and does it work?

Or perhaps you've got a software utility that claims the port constantly? For instance, a Palm sync utility?


If you have USB why would you need 10Mb Ethernet since USB appears to be faster ?

1) The theoretical maximum speed of USB is faster than the theoretical maximum speed of ethernet, yes. But there's a lot of system overhead associated with USB, making it much slower than that. So actually ethernet is a tiny bit faster at the current time.

2) Ethernet is useful for developers who want to monkey with Linux on the Empeg.

3) Some computers/OS's can't run USB (95/NT4) but can run ethernet.

4) Ethernet is cool.

5) Interesting applications can be written for ethernet, like the Displayserver applet.


The price difference between a 10Mb NIC and a 100Mb NIC is sod all so why limit a top piece of kit to old technology when there is a requirement to load 10's of Gb of music before you can use it.

1) 10mb is plenty fast, and you only need to load the 10gb once. After that, little synchs take only a couple minutes.

2) Although you can buy a 100mb ethernet card for your PC easily, it's a different story trying to source raw chips and integrate them directly into a custom board as they've done on the Empeg.

3) Even if Empeg could source the chips and make them work in their design, the other hardware inside the unit isn't fast enough to keep up with the 100mb rate anyway- the drives are linked through an ISA bus that would limit your upload speed anyway.

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Tony Fabris