Tenchu, The standard K6-2 chip is as reliable as intel chips. Failures are rare. As to clone boxes...they are far more serviceable than Dell, IBM or Compaq boxes since the parts can be bought anywhere for less money than CompaqIBM or Dell parts. Most parts now made have a lifetime that exceeds the normal life of the computer. The only weak point in the clones are those cheap mice and keyboards, they will not stand up to 8 hour/day office use, but they are OK for home use. Business buyers know this and buy MS, logiteck, Mouse systems etc good mice instead of those $5 cheapos. Keytronics and Maxiswitch are better than the cheapo $10 keyboards.
All motherboards, cards, power supplies etc are made of standard parts in robot factories and work very well. Less than 1% of clones fail in first year dut to hardware failure. Strangely enough rough shipping causes more dead-out-of-the-box failures than any other cause. Once those are fixed they all soldier on....with one exception...smoking environments...the fine ash destroys bearings in floppy drives, hard drives and cooling fans.
The CBC in Toronto had the overhaul their tape editing decks twice a year for nicotine gum and ash wear...then strict no smoking rule with smoke detector and alarms(they found a rule without the smoke detector was ignored)....it took 3 years for the same amount of wear to accrue.
Apart from that you are quite right about retail, it is dog eat dog out there. Businesses may buy at retail, but they get some insite or onsight service staff as they cannot afford to haul boxes away to a mall when they have a software problem(most problems are software/setup related).
An AMD machine or an Intel machine will work at the same level of reliability as we have become commoditised with regard to CPUs.
In addition, the down time for an IBM/Dell/Compaq for any work will be more than clones since in most areas you must ship them away, but clone stores and on site clone fixers are everywhere. Dell has a good onsite staff for large metro areas, and IBM and compaq have a similar and very pricy service in large areas. All others must ship to somewhere and if it is a software fault you get to pay for it bigtime.
The achilles heel of the big companies is the repair loop, it is long .
Bill |
