All S-Class will move to a RoHS compliant unit as is sold in Europe at the moment. These units can me distinguished by the “L” at the end on the part number.
This is interesting as the actual main board inside these units is very different to the old “S”. This will mean that older images will not suit the next units (a problem for XPe owners). These boards have a mini IDE slot for Flash and a single socketed DIMM for RAM. The old units had the RAM soldiered on the board with no hope up upgrading.
Now just to confuse things a bit…
The original Blazer device the 1200LE had no flash, but the OS has to be someplace right? Correct! The OS was only 512KB, yes that was no typo 512KB in size. So with the non volatile storage on the NIC EPROM this was used to store the OS.
The S10 has a bigger OS of about 1.5MB and the same idea is going to be used with a 2MB storage space on the NIC EPROM holding it and an empty flash slot.
I guess the idea was to cut the cost of the Flash (which was mostly empty) and up the RAM. So we ended up with 3 units, the old S class with flash, the new S Class with flash and finally the new S Class with no flash.
Note this is only for Wyse Thin OS S10, all the other models will have flash depending on the OS they need to support.
Wow, and that looked like a easy post to answer…
-TT