#Packard Bell
Rick –
Packard Bell has to have the worst service I've ever had the unfortunate
experience of attempting to contact. 40+ minute waits on hold…but at
least it wasn't one of those snazzy new 900 tech support lines. <g> Even
Commodore's service department was faster!
My brother bought his DX2-66 minitower last August ('93) for $1800 from
Damark; it looked like a bargain since other brands of DX2's were going
for $2500 or so at the time. Well, the first thing that happened was that
we found out Windows 3.1 wasn't included (why not include it with the
high-end system when it's included in _all_ the other ones?), so he had to
go buy a copy (student discount ;); we used Win3.0 in the interim.
Next we had to download the required video drivers off the Packard Bell
BBS! The stupid thing didn't even include a floppy with drivers! (That,
BTW, was the first time I ever used a modem. 🙂 Anyway, we ended up
downloading the _wrong_ set of drivers (confusion in descriptions),
wasting about an hour (the fastest modem we had was a 1200bps at the
time). So then we finally got the thing running. It was _much_ faster at
PageMaker than the 286/20 he'd been using for the past few years.
The next thing we discovered was that we couldn't disable ROM shadowing,
so no TSR's could be loaded into high memory. We had to make boot disks
for all our games. In fact, we can't even get Gunship 2000 CD to load
anymore; it needs 580K free mem and the most we can possibly squeeze out
is 570K.
He bought a Compaq 486SX-33 with integrated VESA video for his girlfriend
earlier this year. It was redrawing windows MUCH faster than his DX2-66.
Then we looked at our old CompuAdd 333 Tower with their special Hirez
video board — even it was faster than his! To top all that off, his
computer is just an ISA machine, so he can't take advantage of any
accelerators.
Then, this past summer, he bought a 540MB hard drive to supplement the
meager 160MB one that the system came with. Guess what happened when we
installed it. Nothing worked. I took the 540 off and just put the 160
back. Nothing. My brother went out and bought two different IDE cables.
Still nothing. I took the 160 off and tried the 540 by itself. Nothing.
Desperate to get all the data off, I opened up the 333T, took out its SCSI
card, reinstalled its original IDE card, and tried it out. It worked
(after flipping the cable a couple of times — why don't they put a red
dot on the pin corresponding to the red line?). I got the files off with
a Syquest and then tried reinstalling it in the 486. Still nothing. So,
he took it to the local (across town) Computer City to have it serviced.
Fortunately, it was still under warranty, so they exchanged the hard
drives at no charge. Then they installed the 540 and formatted
everything.
BUT…no video drivers again. Sooooo, I had to call up the BBS again
(this time with a 14.4kbps modem on my 4000) and download the drivers.
Except there was a problem — the colors weren't right (Jupiter from
Microsoft Scenes had bad green fringes, among other problems). So I
looked and downloaded again…nothing changed. So we called them up and
got them to send us a driver disk…still no better. So we're just living
with it now.
Also, we had to reinstall Windows several times during the course of all
this. Sometimes the video driver list wasn't updated correctly; sometimes
the apps (like ATM) decided that they didn't like what we did and had to
be reinstalled as well; and the stupid driver kept changing the _default_
colors every time we selected it!
Then, the day before the warranty expired, the mouse went out.
Fortunately, we got them to send out a new one (it works much better than
the old one ever did, BTW.)
Oh well. If he ever buys another PC, I'll make sure it's an Ocean DCA-2
(EDRAM) Pentium.
You don't like Gateway? Why not? How about Dell?
– Jim, on AutoPilot!