lenny@icus.UUCP (Lenny Tropiano) (01/04/88)
In article <655@pttesac.UUCP> vanam@pttesac.UUCP (-Root Admin-) writes: |> |>Well, I'm finally going to say it: I *do* have problems with 3B1 |>reliability! |> Well I can tell you from experience it is really a matter of luck. I don't know what AT&T (or is it Convergent's) quality control is like, but it seems pretty random. This past year, 1987, our primary product line for computers was the AT&T 3B1 (both 40Mb and 67Mb configuration). We, American LP Systems, Inc. (Node quincy), wrote a package for Fuel Oil and LP Gas dealers in C (Accounts Recv). Basically the small dealers only needed the smaller machines (3B1) but some of the bigger ones got 3B2's. Now we are forced to sell the 6386's which we haven't even seen in our office yet. (But that's another story) Speaking with the AT&T Technician that we deal with on Long Island, he said the 3B1's are a pretty sturdy machines, they usually break (if at all) in the first 90 days (warranty period) most often they break right away in the first week. Now we have about 32 customers with 3B1's right now and I've made calls on a few of these. The problems that occur are often the fan breaking, which leads to a new fan and most like hard drive. The second most common problem is something on the mother board. What's really funny if the battery on the motherboard dies (clock doesn't operate) they replace the whole motherboard (is this sick or what). $2.50 lithium battery versus a $2000 motherboard?! Most of our customers choose to take the service maintenance contract, if they don't do it right away they usually take it after the first charge that they get :-) Some remote things that didn't work were serial boards, tape controller boards, and power supplies. Those usually didn't break after the fact, they usually come broken. Out of 32 systems I would say 4-5 had serious problems like hard drives and motherboards. Now this doesn't say much, 15% of the computers are bad? Well I bought my own during the fire sale, I would hate to have to put any money like $2000 into my system, especially when the whole system was $1500 to start with! |>"PANIC: kernel addressing error" messages and my hard disk got trashed |>with hundreds of bad blocks. So they changed my mother board. [...] That a new one on me... There aren't that many boards in the 3B1 :-) so if something like that happens it's usually the motherboard. They don't replace individual chips, they replace the entire boards and the broken board is returned to be repaired. Only once did our technicial replace a chip, the floppy drive didn't work and they tried a new floppy controller, that cleared it all up. |>I am *very* tired of having a flaky system. I'd like to know just |>what the repair call rate is for these units. |> All in all I think these machines are pretty good. It might be that your machine got bounced around during the freight or you're having just some real bad luck! BTW: What distribution is this group --> pb.unix.3b1? -Lenny -- ============================ US MAIL: Lenny Tropiano, ICUS Computer Group IIIII CCC U U SSSS PO Box 1 I C C U U S Islip Terrace, New York 11752 I C U U SSS PHONE: (516) 968-8576 [H] (516) 582-5525 [W] I C C U U S AT&T MAIL: ...attmail!icus!lenny TELEX: 154232428 IIIII CCC UUU SSSS UUCP: ============================ ...{uunet!godfre, harvard!talcott}!\ ...{ihnp4, boulder, mtune, bc-cis, ptsfa, sbcs}! >icus!lenny "Usenet the final frontier" ...{cmcl2!phri, hoptoad}!dasys1!/