Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!cbmvax!rutgers!im4u!ut-sally!bcm!rice!titan!phil From: phil@titan.rice.edu (William LeFebvre) Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga Subject: Commodore loses a customer! Message-ID: <517@ra.rice.edu> Date: 7 Jan 88 18:31:32 GMT Sender: usenet@rice.edu Reply-To: phil@rice.edu (William LeFebvre) Organization: Rice University, Houston, Tx Lines: 56 Keywords: stupidity No, not me........but a friend of mine. He purchased a 2000 with an extra 3.25" drive, a 5" drive, and a bridge card thru the mail-order firm "Sprite Technology". The extra parts did not come installed, but he had planned on that. When he went to install the drives, the installation instructions sent with the drive said to remove a connector from the motherboard. He did that, but one of the middle pins on the board came off with the connector. "No problem," he says, "it's only a day old and still on warranty." He did what the warranty said; he took his machine to a local dealer. They looked at it and said "it's obviously defective, but you opened the case and therefore violated the warranty. Tough luck." I told him "don't listen to them, get the facts straight from Commodore." So he called customer service and supposedly talked to the person in charge of customer service (I don't have the person's name handy). This representative of Commodore was very rude to my friend and basically said "you obviously broke it yourself." I ask you, how can someone break off a MIDDLE pin by simply removing the connector? In other words, the pin that broke was not on the end of the connector, and none of the other pins were even bent. You can't do that by merely pulling the connector off incorrectly. The rep's attitude was basically "we don't care about you," but he did give him the name of another local company that would do the repair (not under warranty, of course). My friend contacted this firm, and they said "we don't work on that particular machine." So much for Commodore's advice. My friend has given up on Commodore and is going to send the machine back to Sprite. Meanwhile, Sprite doesn't answer their phone (but that's a different story). Why doesn't Commodore stand behind its product? They can't afford to do this to their customers. Is it really a violation of warranty to simply open the case? I don't recall the warranty saying anything about that. When Commodore was faced with an obviously defective unit, they tried to weasel out of their responsibility by accusing the owner of breaking it himself. I know this guy---he's not clumsy, he's very careful and knows what he's doing. I am very disappointed in this revelation, it has greatly decreased my confidence in Commodore. I love my machine too much to give it up, I just hope I never get stuck under Commodore's heavy thumb. Commodore had better wake up and wake up soon to the fact that most people will not buy a product that has no support from its manufacturer. IBM learned this a long time ago. You can say whatever you want about the inferiority of its products, but IBM stands behind them. My friend is going to visit his IBM dealer. And a mutual friend of ours has been totally turned off of Commodore and its Amigas (she was seriously considering buying one). So, Commodore loses two customers. Sad...... William LeFebvre Department of Computer Science Rice University