Hi, Michael:
Michael posted:
"I was also wondering by doing this memory upgrade have I de-valued the 42s at all ?"
Other people will surely think differently, but in my own personal opinion, yes, an "upgraded" 42S is less valuable than an original, unhacked one.
From a collector's perspective, this should be obvious. The machine is always worthier with its original components and intact cosmetics than it can ever be with replaced chips and the unavoidable cosmetical side effects of the modification.
Plus, from both a collector's and a user's perspective,
- You can never be 100% sure that the modification was properly done and the machine is 100% stable, and what effects it may have on the machine's stability in the long run.
- Perhaps it will develop some bad RAM locations and you'll be getting corrupted results from time to time without even noticing it, or even worse, lose all 32 Kb of painstakingly entered programs without ever knowing if it was the modification or something you did wrong.
- Perhaps you'll notice batteries running down much quicker than before, due to greater power comsumption caused by the newly installed, non-original RAM chip.
- Perhaps you'll notice the machine runs noticeable slower, as the operating system has to move to and fro much larger blocks of RAM than before when editing, for instance, so you'll begin to experience a nasty effect similar to the much dreaded 'garbage collection' ...
In a word, I would never "upgrade" one of my own 42S, and I would never buy an "upgraded" 42S except at a really bargain price (say no more than US$ 50 or so), and then only to be used as an instructional or demo machine, never for real-life, professional use. Any higher a price and I'd rather spend more and buy the real, original, unhacked machine.
It's also the case that I think that 7 Kb are more than enough for such a calculator. Any problem requiring more RAM than this, I would use one of my HP-71B (160 Kb) which has a much better and convenient keyboard (specially for alpha input) and a much higher-level language and instruction set (specially with the Math ROM), not to mention full I/O.
That failing, I'd use one of my laptops (768 Mb RAM). For the kind of applications the HP42S is best, 7 Kb are more than enough.
But this is just my opinion, I'm sure lots of people would do or pay whatever was necessary to upgrade and would be perfectly happy to get or buy such a machine, though I'm inclined to think they'd intend it for use, not to collect,
and they aren't afraid of relying on it for professional practice, where legal liabilities are a big concern and a hacked machine which produces wrong results can result in big trouble.
Last, there's also the inescapable fact that an unhacked HP42S retains the potential to be hacked, if deemed necessary, at a future time, while a hacked 42S can never revert to its original, pristine condition, so you've indeed lost something.
Best regards from V.