Xref: utzoo comp.sys.tandy:1289 comp.sys.ibm.pc:27805 Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!ucbvax!pasteur!ames!xanth!lll-winken!uunet!jarthur!ahaley From: ahaley@jarthur.Claremont.EDU (Alexander Haley) Newsgroups: comp.sys.tandy,comp.sys.ibm.pc Subject: Re: Is there really no better value? Summary: It depends what you want. Keywords: TANDY PRICES Message-ID: <948@jarthur.Claremont.EDU> Date: 24 Apr 89 03:41:22 GMT References: <1454@csm9a.UUCP> <5432@cs.Buffalo.EDU> Reply-To: ahaley@jarthur.UUCP (Alexander Haley) Organization: Harvey Mudd College, Claremont, CA Lines: 70 I am a student at a school that received a Sloan/IBM grant and now have some PS/2 model 30/286's, a couple model 70's, a personal pageprinter and a scanner. I must say that I used to dislike IBM for their high prices, idiotic setups for their pc's and other things too numerous to list. It was only a dislike for personal reasons, if I was given one, I would not have complained. This has all changed. Now, I would refuse anything that has the IBM name on it. Everthing that follows is from persomal experience while trying to set up this lab we have for these pc's, all of my information has been gleaned from the shoddy uninformative manuals (a VERY time consuming process), so it is most likely wrong since those manuals are from IBM. What good is a 286 that you can only put one floppy drive into and only 2 or 3 expansion slots? I mean once you get your token ring adapter card, modem and extra memory card in there you have no room for any more of the gizmos that they have for you. I mean you can't even add a game port now... Tandy has two joystick inputs standard. They sre also extremely slow!! The model 30/286's have 20 meg hard drives standard, i think. These drives must have an access tim of about 100 ms, I mean slow!! The machines are also slow. The model 70's I've been told are 16 MHz. My machine is a 286 16 MHz and beat the 70's by 2 points on many of the standard benchmarks. Now, the pageprinter. It is the slowest most ugly peice of crap we have sitting in that room right now. It takes about 45 sec. to process a graph from IBM's own Grapher that runs under windows and then the ppaper seems to go through it in slo-motion. For some reason, if you have anything too complicated graphics-wise, it will barff on you. This means that if you have a graph that has 200 points that are scattered with a line connecting all of them, it will not print, you are stuck with an image on your screen that you can do nothing with. The scanner. i'm not sure, we did not receive a cable that goes with it as far as i can tell, unless this cable is the one and in that case, we need an expansion card which we do not have. Also, IBM did not want us to be the first to open any of there things up. The sent this dork from Entre computers who could not figure out why one of the model 70's would not boot with a card that IBM forgot to send the options disk with, so we did not have the drivers installed. This guy did not know what he was doing, and then when i remarked that I thought IBM asked too much for their stuff that you could do nothing with, he started jumping all over me and then basically agreed to what I said, but added that IBM gives "real" support where these mail-order companies will sell you your computer and then when you call with a problem will say (and I quote him) "Fuck off." Well, this has not been my experience. Also, I much prefer talking to someone on the phone who knows what they are doing rather than alling some stupid receptionist and waiting two days for someone who really doesn't know more about adjusting cards and typing things into a computer any better than I do come out and tell me I needed to switch this jumper. Or, even worse, this guy could come out and do something, leave and not me what the problem is thinking that I am some stupid dork. Well, I would be if I bought an IBM. Their documentation. It is worse having IBM documentation than having no doccumentation at all. The manuals spend 200 pages just confusing you, because they give you so little information. When I asked a representative of IBM why users were given so little info. he told me that they did not want to confuse their costumers too much with extraneous info. Now, maybe that is a good idea to keep out of the main sections, but it should be in their somewhere, easily locatable. I still have not found anywhere in the DOS 4.01 manual how this use of the extra 384 K can be done and when it is usable. BTW if anyones knows, post or email. thanks. ok, now that I have slammed on IBM from a personal level, I wwill say that they try to support their products. For a big company which did not want to mess with it and just make a call and let them worry about it, that's great let tham have it, but with all of the other choices out there, Tandy being one of them, a normal everyday Joe or a sophisticated college, CS major would have to be totally stupid and inane to purchase IBM stuff for personal use. Falmes are welcome. I need to be informed, since IBM can't do it adequately all by themselves. Alex Haley