🚀 go-pugleaf

"Peter Dolman" <pdolman@sk.sympatico.ca> wrote:

>Good move, Dan!
>BTW, most of the proprietary systems are specifically designed for the
>"after-market dollars" (oops! Pounds!).  It is a very lucrative business,
>but buyers here have got very savvy to it.  Typically, if you have to buy a
>product from a manufacturer to upgrade or add-on, expect to pay 50-100%
>more than "street price" for the same item.  What ticks me off about this
>scheme is that it specifically targets new users that lack the know-how to
>see what's going on.  They inevitably buy a nice brand name system, get
>into computers, but then want to upgrade.  Then they get fleeced for their
>trust.
>
>I don't know about the UK, but Compaq here is selling system without cache
>(extra $50 for 256K) -- yes, a pentium 166 MHz with 32 Meg of RAM and
>*zero* L2 Cache!  The other money grab from the innocent is that they are
>charging $19.95 for each Tech call, *even if it is a warranty issue*.  I
>have recommended all my clients avoid Compaq until they stop this nonsense.

I HATE these proprietry machines, and to a great extent the stores
that sell them. Last week I was called out to put some extra memory in
an Olivetti machine that some poor guy had bought from a popular high
street store. He had been told by a friend that memory might make his
machine faster - because he was rather disappointed with its
performance, which had been lousey since the day he bought it (6
months earlier). The problem was that the L2 cache was disabled in the
BIOS setup.....so this guy had spend a grand and a half on a machine
that ran like a 386......personally I don't know how the good people
of Dock Green can sleep at night.....

Gareth Jones