CompuServe Thread

Techni-Soft appears to be a company with a good product but a poor understanding of the industry. They've been darn near imposssible to get ahold of during the last week, and they >lied< to me on the phone about ship dates. On the other hand, they have a valid excuse for the change in ship dates (no excuse is sufficient for leaving the phone to an answering machine for almost a week straight). To whit, apparently they got their shipment of 200 production boards in. During testing, thes board developed 16 bad RAM locations after about 2 hours of use. Further testing indicated that replacing a 74F245 chip with a 74FACT245 fixed the problem. While 74 series chip numbers are just numbers to me, this problem rings a bell due to the recent discussion about the TWOMEG board (user-uploaded schematic in DL8), which had a similar problem. So, they're doing the replacement on those 200 boards, along with extensive testing to make sure the problem's gone, and they say they are going to ship all 13 of our boards on Tuesday the 7th. If the delays present a problem to any of the group purchasers, I can provide a refund and decrease the size of the order. I'd rather not have to go through that, and I think it would be premature to back out, but I'll do it if necessary. Note that they DID finally >call me< instead of the other way around. The guy I talked to said that during their 3-day absence, they piled up 400 phone calls. They appear to be understaffed and they have a choice of not answering the phone or not shipping products. Or hiring more people, but that requires cash that needs to go into inventory at this point. Maybe someone in the Salt Lake City area would like to do what I did with Mimetics: visit the office. Offer to help them fend off phone calls for a day or two, so that they can concentrate on shipping products, in exchange for one of their boards. Or the other way around: you sit there packaging boards while they deal with phone calls. Believe me, this kind of user push can really help a company, while the user gains from it as well. – Bela