SEB@pucc.Princeton.EDU (Scott E Barron) (05/16/89)
If you have experience using or servicing Tandon and/or Wells American personal computers, then would you please send me a note detailing your experience and your opinion of these machines. Please reply via e-mail to SEB@pucc.princeton.edu. I will post a summary of the responses. Thank you, Scott
werner@aecom.yu.edu (Craig Werner) (05/18/89)
> If you have experience using or servicing Tandon and/or Wells American > personal computers I recently bought a Wells-American CompuStar in what I consider a dream configuration: 80386 cpu with 2 5.25" inch disk drives (one 1.2M, one 360K), 2 1.44M 3.5" disk drives (that's four floppies total) and a 40M hard drive, which still leaves me with a full-height drive bay left. I added the VGA expansion (and since I passed on their monitors and bought a Seiko CM-1430) I can someday support 1024*768 video resolution if I could ever find software that would want to do such a thing. Considering that I upgraded from a five-year old IBM PC, the speed-up is dramatic, but then again, so would anything. And the diskette situation confused the heck out of someone who was used to a PS/2 model 25, but who acquired a PC (and needed 3.5 -> 5.25 inch conversion). Having been used to doing everything at the "A> prompt" having the programs reside on "E>" was a little mind-blowing. Compatibilitywise, it runs IBM's own PC-DOS. They sell OS/2, but I saw no reason. It loads Leisure Suit Larry screens almost instantaneously. Wells-American makes a big deal of the following: the CPU is on a seperate module, and for that matter so is the bus. You can buy it with a 80286, then change to a 80386 later, or in what is a more likely scenario, change it from a 16MHz to a 25Hz, or (and this is sheer speculation) wait a while and go from 386 to 486. You can also add Micro-Channel circuitry, if there ever presents a pressing need to do this. And one other thing: this machine will never be confused for a laptop. It is big. As a tower, it's about 7 inches wide, and a little over an AT length high AND deep (it's almost square). I heard that some computer magazine said it met the army's definition of portable (which is that if a battalion can move it, it's portable). Actually, I was able to carry it up three flights of stairs by its handle, but at over 50 pounds, I'm glad I didn't drop it on my toe, and I did have to use both hands. Price: at about $5000 complete, you could get an almost comparable system for less (or more, for that matter). I don't think anybody sells an exactly comparable system (for instance, I've never seen any other system with room for more than 5 storage devices. With 5 installed, I still have room for 1 or 2 more.) Similarly, I have six free expansion slots. For a price, I could get 5 MCA slots or 6 more regular slots (13 all told). That's expandability to the point of overkill, but hey, I'm not complaining. -- Craig Werner (future MD/PhD, 4.5 years down, 2.5 to go) werner@aecom.YU.EDU -- Albert Einstein College of Medicine (1935-14E Eastchester Rd., Bronx NY 10461, 212-931-2517) "Doonesbury is more important than self-respect."