naparst@brahms.BERKELEY.EDU (Harold Naparst) (01/25/86)
I am considering buying a clone in order to save money. The salesmen swear up and down that the machines run everything except IBM BASIC. In fact, they say that their technical support people will help me IF anything doesn't work. What I want to hear is stories from satisfied and unsatisfied clone users.
kens@ISM780.UUCP (01/27/86)
> What I want to hear is stories from satisfied and unsatisfied clone users.
There are clones and clones. If the clone you buy is a Compaq, you
aren't likely to have a lot of problems, but you'll pay a premium
price, possibly more than for a comparable IBM machine. Then there
are the many low-cost Brand-X clones, identifiable only by the
private label that some mail-order house or your local computer
store puts on them.
I am an unsatisfied Brand-X clone user. I had a very old IBM
PC, the kind with 64k of memory max on the motherboard. I
wanted more slots and more motherboard memory, but IBM wanted
$600 for a new motherboard. I ended up buying a new
XT-compatible Taiwanese clone motherboard for $125 and an
8-slot XT-like case for $50 from AMT (American Micro
Technology) in Santa Ana, California. The good thing about
this setup is that it takes all 640k on the motherboard using
2 rows of 64k and 2 rows of 256k RAM. This is how it ought to
be done.
However, the problems I have had are:
a) The case is a piece of garbage. You have a major wrestling
match to put the top cover back on once you have taken it off because
the sheet metal is so flimsy and poorly-worked. Holes for disk
drive retaining screws simply don't line up. (I've had to drill some).
b) The ROM pseudo-BIOS has several bugs in it. Most are
merely annoying, and involve not sensing keyboard input at
certain times. But the floppy disk I/O in this BIOS is
"totally bogus" because it's so slow that it must be
hitting only sector per rev.
c) I have unexplained crashes in my word processor with this
board that I never had with my IBM PC. I am fairly sure the
motherboard hardware is the culprit, since I have
eliminated all other possible factors (I even borrowed a
real IBM BIOS ROM for one day to check whether it was a
BIOS problem, and the crashes continued).
My advice: DON'T BUY A BRAND-X CLONE UNTIL YOU HAVE OPENED THE BOX
AND SPENT SOME TIME RUNNING THE SOFTWARE YOU INTEND TO USE.
Ken Sarno
INTERACTIVE Systems Corp.
..!ima!ism780!kensnclee@sbcs.UUCP (Nai Chi Lee) (01/28/86)
<<"It is SYMBOLIC" -- Life Of Brian>>
I own a Fountain PC for five month now. I have tried all kinds of softwares
that I can lay my hand on: CrossTalk XVI, dBase III, Lotus 123, Turbo
Pascal, WordStar 2000, PC Paint, Gem DeskTop, ... and some 20 arcade games.
Nearly all of them works.
The exceptions being a few BASIC games (still, most of them can work if I
load in the Compaq Basic), and the game "Apple Panic" by Serria-On-Line (I
tried it on Tandy 1000, Sperry PC, IBM AT, and none of them works either).
My experience is that if at first a software don't work, it is usually not
due to incompatibility, but just not installated correctly.
When repairing a IBM PC for my friend, I borrowed his BIOS and BASIC ROM,
and pluged into my PC clone. The clone then seems 100% "the realy thing".
The only remaining difference being the half height disk. I heard something
about Sargon III can only be copied on a full height disk...
CSNET: nclee@sbcs.csnet
ARPA: nclee%suny-sb.csnet@csnet-relay.arpa
UUCP: {allegra, hocsd, philabs, ogcvax} !sbcs!nclee
"It is difficult to make something foolproof because fools are so ingenious."
[Anon]werner@aecom.UUCP (Craig Werner) (01/30/86)
Any Clone that uses the BIOS by Phoenix systems is so compatible that
they will run PC-DOS, which is actually a way to get around certain problems
that arise when certain programs will not run under generic MS-DOS on these
machines.
The story of how Phoenix wrote the BIOS to be 100% compatible and also
Lawsuit proof is worth looking up and reading purely for its value as
literature.
--
Craig Werner
!philabs!aecom!werner
"The end. 94. 95. The very, very, very end."