🚀 go-pugleaf

I posted this a while back, but since you asked about Zenon, I had to let you
know to STAY AWAY from them unless they've dramatically changed their ways of
business:

In August, 1992, a friend and myself were shopping for two 486DX/50 Local Bus 
systems.  We followed the Computer Shopper, and carefully read through all 
ads for about 3 months prior.  Zenon Computers appeared to have the best 
prices at that time, and they had a large color add which led us to believe 
that they would be a good company to deal with. 

We finally decided to order from them and got what we thought was a great 
deal, but turned out to be the worst mail-order experience of our lives.  We 
had the computers shipped UPS Code Blue (2nd day air).  When they arrived, 
upon opening the box, I found the plastic back of the case to be broken on 
mine.  None of the indicator lights on the case were connected either, which 
gave me a bad impression of the quality right away.  The computer booted at 
16MHz(off turbo) and did not switch to 50MHz until the BIOS initialization 
finished.  Local Bus at that time was proprietary, so we had to use their 
video card, which was combined with the IDE controller on the one LB slot.  
The video BIOS had a REALLY annoying startup with scrolling colors that lasted
at least 10-15 seconds(even with Ctrl-Alt-Del), and this combined with the 
16MHz startup made the entire boot process at least 3-4 times as slow as my 
old 386/25.

When running Windows, I experienced frequent locks, and my friend's computer 
would not even run a graphical application period without locking.  I took the
case off only to find 4 loose screws just rolling around inside the case (just
waiting to find the right location to ground the motherboard to the case :-( 
).  The combo VGA/IDE card had a wire running from one of the chips to another
pin (just like in the engineering labs), and we discovered from talking to
a Zenon "technician" that the cards weren't really supposed to work at greater
than 33 MHz, but they were able to find a few that they could get to work --
boy this instilled a world of confidence in me -- especially since my friend's
card did not survive the trip from California.  He called to report the problem
with his video card, and was promised a new S3 accelerator card that was not
local bus -- what actually arrived was a Trident 8900CL card -- certainly 
not the speed we originally hoped for by purchasing an S3 Local Bus accelerator.

Anyway, to say the least, we were TOTALLY dissatisfied with the product and 
called our salesman.  He was completely uncooperative, and we eventually had 
to ship the computers back.  The only problem was that they would not pay 
shipping so we lost $220 for the 2nd day air shipping, and another $120 to 
return them to Zenon.  And finally, to top it all off, they did not refund an 
additional $200 to my credit card.  When I called them, they said it was 
because we had OPENED the DOS and Windows packages!!  How were we supposed to 
USE the computer without an OS?!?!?  PLUS, they kept the DOS and Windows 
packages, so they have both our money and the product they charged us for.

In conclusion, I sincerely hope that you do not plan to do business with Zenon,
because you will only be hurting yourself.

-Darren Jones
-Virgil Wall