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To: Tony Viola who wrote (59670)	10/22/2001 9:47:47 PM
From: pgerassi	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 275872

Dear Tony: The experience of many companies is that Dell is not very good at support for those of us that are technicians in our own right. They ask us silly questions that have no bearing on the problem at hand just to get us off the line. Their service is mostly as bad as those that use third parties and sometimes it is worse. That is not what I would call good service. The standard for good service I use is the kind that IBM, DEC and AT&T used to give. This is the type of service that if a computer is non functional, they will move heaven and earth to get it working within the time stated in the contract. In one case in 1986, AT&T delivered a DOA 3B2 (yes, that is the one with a WE32K CPU and 286s on each IO board). It had a 4 hour contract (4 hours from call to technician and 4 hours from the technician arriving to system up (for system not usable errors (DOA certainly qualified))) and the technician arrived after an hour after the call was placed. He replaced the motherboard after a certain amount of checking. He guaranteed me that there would be no way it would not be up in 4 hours even if, and I quote, "they had to take the next system off the line in Trenton (NJ) and ship it here by corporate jet!" Mind you this was a small 3B2 (about $20K then). After 2 years, they bought NCR and their service went downhill (the dreaded third party route). But before then, service was fast (no call took more than 2 hours to get a technician (counting only the 8AM to 5PM weekdays time on the subsequent contract) and it always was fixed within the hour upon arrival (the problem was usually the power supply (they used a cheap Mexican one for the small 3B2s)). Typical up time was 6 months (between PS failures and SW upgrades). As to DIY system reliability, all of my systems lasted until well after I had given them to family and friends. The most replaced component was keyboards, mice and CD-ROM burners. Heck one system built by a small SD shop lasted 18 years (HD failure was the cause, an ancient RLL drive). It was a 386DX 20MHz with 4MB running SCO Xenix 386 and 40MB disk with a 20MB Colorado tape drive (1/4" cartridge). Of course it had a good true UPS on it (it was installed into a TV/FM/AM station). 8 of the systems my relatives and I have built have used AMD CPUs, a 386DX40, a 486DX2-66, 2 K6-2/450s, a K6-3/400 and 3 Tbirds (800/200, 1.2G/266 and recently a 1.4G/266). None have failed yet. We did lose an Intel 386DX33 and an Intel Pentium 133 over the years. The oldest system has a working i8080 2MHz that is fired up only for nostaligic reasons. Pete