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Technology Stocks : Ampex Corporation (AEXCA) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Michael Olds who wrote (9232)	6/15/1999 6:51:00 PM
From: Hal Campbell	Respond to of 17679

Alot of possibilities Mike. Imagining they use the shaming technique behind the scenes though...not in news releases. WAYYYY OFF TOPIC - The Computer Saga ( or My Little Knowledge Is A Dangerous Thing) In a nutshell ( and Steve and Ken and Mike who replied were essentially right ). My Texas friends bought a Gateway. They were concerned that they got all they paid for. I asked them to check My Computer for hard drive capacity. Showed 8.47 ( on a 9.1 gig drive). The 8,4 gig drive they sell is 33% slower so that seemed a possible problem. Thought maybe the binary measurement was different ( as Mike Steve and ken suggested) so went to web to check. Worded query a little imprecisely, so ran into a widespread 8.4 gig BIOS barrier problem instead....lol.. Read 3 white papers on subject.So my friends thought they had a 9.1 gig drive without BIOS support ...and Gateway bought that and sent a new one. Same reading on My Computer. Conversations with Western Digital and new Gateway reps ensued ...hours of them...lol. Dueling techs. Turns out a more precise wording of web query show 1.07432 as the binomial divider Windows uses to measure capacity, so it was a properly supported 9.1 after all. But the DVD does not work...lol..so Gateway is sending out someone to the home to put in a new one tomorrow. So sincerely attempting to help ( I do blame myself on this) I got my friends to tie up 2 corporations for about 10 hours and cost the company a hundred bucks in needless shipping charges . Western Digital BTW was fantasic. Offered to send a rep out to redo BIOS software the next day too ( they also thought it was a barrier problem). They only make a little on each drive, and so i thought that was OEM service far beyond the call of duty. Gateway fumbled a little, but came through more than properly too. And I am going to stop trying to help people when I know little or nothing about a subject ( I sure hope).