What microchip says:
The picstart is fine for prototyping, testing and one-offs.  Verifying the
programming at the outer edges of vcc is a good idea for production work.

My own anecdotal comment:
I use the picstart with my 16f8xx chips and haven't had a single instance
where the programming didn't take.  If I were going to create many (20 or
more) I would consider building a programmer which verifies at multiple
voltages.

Don't worry about it for prototyping.

-Adam

Nicholas Irias wrote:
>
> The Microchip docs on ICSP recommend that the Promate be used to program the
> flash chips rather than the Picstart.  Apparently the more expensive
> programmer verifies writes at the extremes of the chip's rated Vcc range.
>
> In practice, does the Picstart programmer work in this application, or is it
> an unmitigated disaster?  I am interested in trying the newer flash chips,
> but not interested enough to shell out for a $700 programmer before buying
> my first chip.
>
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