Anything I should know before buying a 71B?

[Valentin Albillo]

(03-16-2021 12:50 PM)Dave Britten Wrote:  Are there any listed here (or available elsewhere) that are generally considered essential, and used by a large percentage of programs?

For me the absolutely essential, which are loaded at all times on my physical/virtual HP-71Bs, are the following:

• The Math ROM. Or better, J-F Garnier's Math Pac 2. Essential, can't live without it.
        
• The JPC ROM. Essential. can't live without it
        
• The HP-IL ROM. For anything I/O and boolean operations.
        
• The LEX file STRINGLX. Essential, can't live without it.

All other are for me unnecessary, never use them but of course your mileage might vary.

A final advice: do not have many LEX files loaded at a time, either individually or packed in a single LEX file, because (apart from hogging RAM unnecessarily) having many can and will very appreciably slow down the HP-71B. Keep permanently loaded just the ones you actually use most frequently and keep the rest at hand just in case, to be loaded occasionally if needed and then deleted after use.

Remember, the physical HP-71B is one slow machine and if you have it searching all the time among hundreds of keywords and polling many LEX files for the various polls the system issues, you'll potentially slow down operations noticeably.

V.