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Jul 31, 1998, 3:43pm

If I remember correctly, Micronics has flash jumpers. Check the MB
manufacturers web site and you can probably find info on your boards.

Paul

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Aug 1, 1998, 7:51pm

Oh, so your office would rather buy name brand, corner cutting, feature
impaired junk rather than a custom built "to your specs" professional system
just to save 5 or 10% on price? By the way, company I worked for offered
Life Time Labor support on our systems. Like to see you ask Dell, PB, or
one of the others for that? If you have to replace an "out of warranty"
cheapo sound cards in a PB, say, it's $100 to $200+. Replace one of our
AWE64 Golds and it's about $89. So you're gonna pay the price in the end
regardless. Well, it's your companies data, if they choose to risk it, then
they've no one to blame but themselves when a systems fails, or they can't
upgrade because it's proprietary, or it gets clobbered buy a CIH virus.
There's the old saying, "you get what you pay for". If you company hasn't
worried about all the press about these companies doing things like using
refurb parts to using feature cut name brand designs (like the scandal over
the reduced feature Matrox Millennium designed into one of the above named
systems), then I don't know why they would be concerned over security holes
anyway. And let me guess, your office doesn't do tape backups of their
systems either?

Paul

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Aug 1, 1998, 8:02pm

Hey, that's not news to me. As a computer technician, we repair the junk
machines sometimes (though we don't sell them or do warranty work) and sell
people our custom systems all the time after they've realized than what they
bought was junk and we've even had people return NEW "junk" systems where
they bought it and replaced it with one of ours. Also, we had an Office
Depot employee come to work for us, so we know all about their return rate
on this stuff, not to mention that Office Depot tried as hard as possible to
refer what service work they could to us. 90%? Yeah, I believe that 90%
of the buying public is ill-informed and gullible, including the supposed
"professionals" buying computer systems for their companies. Of course
there are a few who have enough sense to at least lease the junk rather than
buy it.

Paul

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Aug 3, 1998, 6:23am

Gee, it only takes a couple of hours to build a custom system depending on
how much software you want installed on it. What do you call bulk? we've
had order for up to 20 - 40 systems at a time. Sure, that takes 3 days to a
week or so to get that many systems built (figuring about 6-10 systems per
day). You're mistaken about companies. Much of our larger sales are to
companies in Industrial Manufacturing Parks around town, local offices for a
nations carpet/tile manufacturer, Real Estate management companies, Utility
companies, Municipal Libraries, Doctors offices, etc. We also sell block
of hours for support if the company doesn't have in house support. Maybe you
just don't have any good local dealers in your area or haven't tried to find
any. That's too bad. As far as game machines, we don't even sell game
software except for what come with the Multimedia package we sell and we
don't compete on price with the department store class machines. If someone
doesn't like our price they are more than welcome to buy a PB at Sam's or
where ever. We will get their money one day when they need it serviced or
upgraded and can't get help from PB (although all the tech bitch about
having to work on the stuff). In fact PB can't even get anyone to become a
PB authorized rep here.
If you only count you system good for "about a year", that just proves my
point.
A company buys one of our systems, it stays running as long as he owns it.
Now if he needs more power/expansion, we get it, upgrade it (be it from a
P233 to a P II 400, or larger hard drive or what ever the case may be),
retaining all the components in the machine that are still usable and all
the company pays is the cost of the new hardware that was upgraded and no
labor charge, where as you in many cases, have to buy a whole new system
(with the exception, maybe of memory and hard drive upgrades). And unless
you buy a service contract with PB and some of the others, you're gonna need
your Credit card handy to get support so they can charge you if the question
or problem turns out not to be directly related to a fault with the hardware
or software that came with the system.
Right, that's a REAL good deal. But I'm just telling you the way it really
is. We don't sell outside our service radius, so it's no skin off my nose
what anyone anywhere else buys. But since we do sometimes work on one of
"those" machines to try and help out a potential future customer, and have
to order the proprietary power supplies and sound cards and motherboards
that cost the customer 50% to 300% more than one of our parts would cost, we
know what junk they are. Now I will concede that many small dealers will
put the cheapest components they can in their custom systems. But most of
those dealers go out of business within 2-4 years. We sell only Intel
CPU's, ASUS, AOpen, Micronics MB's, 250W+ or higher power supplies, ATI,
Diamond, Matrox video cards, Seagate, HP, WD, Maxtor HD's and Tape drives,
Adaptec scsi controllers, Eagle and 3com network cards, USR, Hayes, and one
lower end (Apache) modems.
So, anyone with a modest amount of hardware knowledge can (if the need
arose) buy industry standard parts from any source and replace any component
in our systems, whereas, that same person is limited to getting replacement
part Only from the manufacturer of the "name brand" systems and if he wanted
to upgrade to a more powerful CPU, well, forget it, in fact, he couldn't
even replace the entire motherboard to upgrade in most of those systems
because it wouldn't fit and the manufacturer wouldn't sell it to him to
begin with.
I'll get off the soap box now. I think I've covered the topic pretty
thoroughly.

Paul

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Aug 3, 1998, 6:48am

There's nothing avoided. Unless your in an area that has service centers for
the "brand" machines or you pay for a custom service contract from someone
to come onsite from somewhere, you aren't going to get good, fast service.
That's a fact. 90%+ of the machines we service are turned around by the next
business day (usually the same day if we get the machine before the
afternoon). Oh, I would not recommend leasing systems either. Searching a
database for problems? Those aren't technicians, they are help desk
personnel, just like the people you get on the phone at Microsoft or MSN,
etc. If you talk to one of our techs, you are talking to a person who
builds, services, repairs hardware and software problems both in the shop
and in the field. No databases. Might of course reference a motherboard
manual for some jumper settings or the Microsoft Knowledge Base for some
problems that might crop up, or a manual of hard drive manufactures jumper
and CMOS settings for the odd, old system that doesn't autodetect.

Paul

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Aug 11, 1998, 2:07am

I don't think so. I think drives are like cars, some of them are good and
some are lemons, no matter what the brand and while brand does play a part I
think the good/lemon and brand aspects as a cause of problems probably
splits 50/50. I've had to replace A Quantum and HP in my system. Where I
worked before, it varied. Sometimes Maxtors were crap, sometimes WD,
sometimes Seagate. Probably the key is not to buy the low end models of any
brand.

Paul

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Aug 11, 1998, 8:52pm

If it would make you happy to call JP, call him.
We, involved in the discussion are part of the aw community and since there
are a number of people taking part in the topic, then it must be of interest
to some in the community.
I skip threads I don't care to read quite a lot. You are free to do the
same.

Paul

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Aug 12, 1998, 8:45pm

Post what you like. I will either read it or not.
I'm used to skipping all kinds of stuff in the NG's.
By the way. I didn't start the thread, so if you find it doesn't suit YOUR
interest, well, again, don't read it. Others apparently found it of
interest including myself..
Now, can we drop it?

Paul

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