Howdy,

> About PicStart+,  mine are '96 versions with the flash mod installed, I
> have never had a failure.

Lucky you -- I've had two fail over the course of about 5 years.  Not 
excessive use (in fact, you could say hobby use -- few dozen times a month).

The other thing is they are really, really slow compared to other tools.

After my last one crapped out, I got the EasyProg programmer.  It seems a very 
solid programmer and about 4-8 times faster than the PicStart.  It supports a 
lot of chips (nearly anything I was likely to run into) including newer chips 
and seems pretty rock solid.

In terms of support, the PicStart hasn't had a great history with support for 
chips either.  I remember with the 16F628A's came out and the PicStart didn't 
offer any support for them for about 6 months.  I also got the flash mod and I 
think that with that, they are moving a little faster, but this delay wasn't 
all that long ago.

-- 
Gerry Duprey
Ann Arbor, MI 48103
http://www.cdp1802.org
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