🚀 go-pugleaf

jfw@proteon.com (John Woods) writes:

>gt4148b@prism.gatech.edu (Stephen Carter Morgan) writes:
>>jfw@proteon.com (John Woods) writes:
>>>However, Mac drive vendors usually have two associated costs that the PC
>>>drive vendors do not have (which _really_ has to make you wonder about US
>>>PC vendors!):
>>Why would these things make us wonder about US PC vendors?

>Because the US PC vendors sell LESS for MORE money.  Oh, I'm sorry, you're
>a PC fan, perhaps I should have typed that more slowly.


GROW UP.  All Mac users say you need more technical knowledge to deal with
PC's :^).  Have you even built a PC from scratch?  Nothing but a collection
of parts and manuals....  It took me about 2 hours, including installing the
sound card and CD-ROM.

It may also be that you're closer to Taiwan, Singapore, etc., where the hard
disks are made...  As far as selling less hard disks, if you're talking about
SCSI disks, I MIGHT believe it, since you have a hard time finding SCSI-2
drives <1 GB in the PC shops here.  If you're talking about ALL hard disks,
including IDE, NO WAY.

>Note that high-quality PC systems (like Compaqs), marketed to people whose
>time is worth something, have similar brackets.

So do Packard Bell systems....  Compaq (and definitely Packard Bell) have
other things wrong with them that keep PC hardware types from buying them.
(Non-standard motherboards for both, other reasons (which I am sure you can
think of) for Packard Bell.)  BTW, Compaqs are NOT that fast, especially the
mass-market ones at Office Depot...  Micron systems blow them away, and
Micron got rated higher on buyer satisfaction than Compaq, IBM, Digital, HP,
etc. in Computer Shopper's survey the beginning of this year.  (Micron's 
the same price or cheaper, too!)

>Hot dang, you don't even know a blessed thing about the PC, and here you're
>holding forth on its superiority over the Mac!  Here's a CLUE:  neither FDISK
>nor FORMAT has _anything_ to do with the details of reading and writing disks
>on the PC.  PC hard disks do NOT have driver code written on them.  The PC
>hard disk driver is part of the BIOS (Basic I/O System), and the ROMs which
>contain the appropriate part of the BIOS are on the SCSI adapter card.
>(Except, of course, for PCs where the SCSI chip is on the motherboard[*];
>then the SCSI BIOS will be in the BIOS chips on the motherboard.)


THAT IS correct.  What you said in the first place was "PC drives don't need
formatting software, since they rely on the adapter's built-in driver."  The
adapter won't do a dang bit of good with a new drive if FDISK and FORMAT (or
equivalents for non-DOS systems) aren't available.  Incidentally, you need
a replacement for FDISK if you want to make a partition > 528MB.

>[*] Assuming the SCSI chip works!  There are some PCs where the advertising
>says the motherboard has SCSI built-in, and sure enough, there's an NCR
>SCSI chip on the board -- but it isn't electrically connected to anything.

None of the dealers here have any of those.  Maybe it's connected to the
middle layer or bottom layer of circuitry.  Either that or Australia doesn't
have anything like the Better Business Bureau...  Seen the Mac buyer upset
because MacNet shipped him a rebuilt system on which there was NO WARRANTY
after advertising NEW systems with an Apple 1-year warranty?

-- 
Stephen Carter Morgan
Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta Georgia, 30332
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