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Conference hydra::amiga_v1

Title:	AMIGA NOTES
Notice:	Join us in the NEW conference - HYDRA::AMIGA_V2
Moderator:	HYDRA::MOORE

Created:	Sat Apr 26 1986
Last Modified:	Wed Feb 05 1992
Last Successful Update:	Fri Jun 06 1997
Number of topics:	5378
Total number of notes:	38326

4392.0. "Bad Commodore support" by PAOXCS::MCGOWAN () Thu Jan 03 1991 09:10

    Patrick,
    
    I won't turn this conference into a gripe session, but I want to say
    that I sympathise with you on the unsympathetic attitude that Commodore
    has to its customers, and, yes, dealers too. I have been an Amiga owner
    for almost 3 years now, and have had 2 run-ins with incompetent
    dealers, and subsequently 2 run-ins with Commodore, France. They just
    do not want to know about anything that smacks of a customer problem,
    and the dealers don't get much help from them either. 
    
    Unfortunately, Commodore has never been able to drag itself out of the
    attitudes they developed in the C64 era, and simply do not know how to
    deal with the semi-professional users who own Amigas, nor how to
    develop a network of knowledgeable dealers who can themselves deal with
    these same customers.
    
    The fact that I can't depend on Commodore and its dealers is the only
    thing keeping me from chucking my PC setup, and working only on the
    Amiga. Too bad.
    
    Regards,  Frank.
    
    P.S. I live in Paris. If I can help you with something, don't hesitate.

T.R	Title	User	Personal Name	Date	Lines
4392.1	which FlickerFixer	SALEM::LEIMBERGER		`Mon Jan 07 1991 11:06`	9
	I can see your point, but if you are not running the new flicker fixer card developed by commodore then it is not their place to come up with a fix. If you are running the card from MicroWay then that is where you should look for help. I saw the commodore board on the shelf but haven't seen it installed anywhere so I cannot say if it has this display problem. I do know my dealer tried different monitors for the 3000 an some of those displayed the problem you discribe also. The monitor that came with the 3000 had no such problem. bill
4392.2	bad experience with 3rd parties	MLNCSC::M_FRANZONI	Blue like a Blues	`Mon Jan 07 1991 11:35`	51
	Here is my experience: My brand new A2000 got out of work a couple of month after the purchase ... It just stopped working and there was no chance to get it boot again. I brought to the dealer who sent it to an associated 3rd party service lab, I tried to describe all the symptoms (being me a sw support person, with a little knowledge of hw) but it was useless because the dealer just wrote "general check" on the requested work list ... It was "fixed" after two weeks and returned to me with the note that the hard disk (on janus' pc side) was reformatted because when mounting it WB reported it was a non-dos disk ... this just because I formatted it as FFS and they didn't take care of this ... fortunately were was no unrecoverable data on it ... When I got home, I tested the serial port and got no answer from the printer, nor from the modem, nor form a loopback ... well, what a good general check they did, I thought ... and carried the A2000 back to the service lab showing anger for the bad job (strong by the experience of angry customers handling) and requesting a quick intervention because of the previous two weeks of waiting ... After one week they didn't even opened it ... huh, what about a non-urgent intervention ! 10 days after, the service engineer assigned to repair it called me and this is (more or less) the call log: S.E.: "well, when the serial port doesn't work it means that one of the two chips controlling it is out of work ... I changed both of them so it should now work but I have no way to test it, can you please come and test it at home ?" me: "huh, why can't you test it ? don't you have a loopback at least (just wondering about hw testing utilities (other than about the engineer knowledge))" S.E.: "what's that ? a loopback ?!?" me : (horrified) "gee ! it's a simple rs-232 connector with pin 2 and 3 short circuited so that all the character you send are looped back and received by the port ...you just need some software to handle the port, maybe a terminal emulator ..." S.E.: "mmmh, that sounds interesting - I've got to make one, one of these days" me : "ok, I'm coming with my loopback, see you later ..." ... Great, isn't it ? This is anyway 3rd party service, I never tried direct Commodore support, anyway they have a free hot line to help customers ... I just hope not to have to call it ... but it's nice to know there is such a service ... Cheers, Mauro. BTW, I live in Milan, Italy.