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From: john@bby-bc.UUCP (john)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.xenix
Subject: Re: MicroPort Customer Support
Message-ID: <157@bby-bc.UUCP>
Date: Sat, 19-Sep-87 15:10:55 EDT
Article-I.D.: bby-bc.157
Posted: Sat Sep 19 15:10:55 1987
Date-Received: Sat, 26-Sep-87 00:47:50 EDT
References: <10077@beta.UUCP> <945@minnow.UUCP> <92@sdeggo.UUCP>
Organization: Burnaby, British Columbia, Canada
Lines: 60
Summary: a contradictory opinion

In article <92@sdeggo.UUCP>, dave@sdeggo.UUCP (David L. Smith) writes:
> 
> It's amazing how bad Microport customer support has gotten, in such a short
> period of time.  When I originally purchased my system, back in December,
> they were pretty good.  They had an 800 number to call, the people answering
> the phone were fairly intelligent, and they would ship disks free.
> 
> If they're going to try to compete they'd better get their act together.
> Saving $500 is nice, but it doesn't really matter if the product doesn't work.
> 

Since there have been two or three articles complaining about Microport
I thought I would throw my two cents in.

My experience has been generally good.  I started with the 1.3.6 version
and it took about 2 hours from scratch to get the system installed. I
really don't see how it could have taken the two days to get the system
installed that some people have claimed (two days elapsed maybe if you
had to get a replacement disk but two days of actual effort??).  Mind
you I am also domewhat paranoid and never even considered using the easy
install command to do it - I wanted to know exactly what was going on so
I did the manual install.  My only unpleasant experience with the install
was some sort of file system error (can't remember what now) which had
me fixing inodes by hand with fsdb during the first couple of hours -
I would like to emphasize that I had never had to do anything like this
before (on a unix system anyway) and so had to rtfm and guess a bit but
even so it wasn't hard to do.

Installing the 2.2 upgrade was also very easy.  I do think that they
should perhaps improvement the docs relating to installation for the
peace of mind of the faint of heart - but at worst you make a mistake
and just start over again after restoring your backup - what's the big
deal?

While their customer support is not ideal it does seem adequate.  The
people I have talked to seem to know what they (and more importantly, I)
am talking about.  They have also returned my calls at their expense.
When I asked for a copy of the tape device driver they sent it out at their
expense.

Their implementation seems reasonably bug free; I have found the following
bugs irritating but not disastrous:

1. clock runs slow (apparently this has been fixed)
2. system gets "double faults" and hangs every once in a while
   - this has never happened while I have actually been on the
     system doing anything so I can't characterize it; it does
     seem to happen more often now that I have a tape unit on
     the system

This is not to say there are no other bugs but the rest don't particularly
affect me - e.g. apparently the system can't handle 9600 baud serial
connections well, but then I don't have any 9600 baud devices attached so
it is not a problem.


I am not in any way associated with Microport except as a reasonably
satisfied customer.

john