tsukada@math.rutgers.edu (Haruo Tsukada) (05/02/88)
In article <1921@ur-tut.UUCP> rhir_ltd@ur-tut (Bob Hirosky) writes: > Hey Commodore, where are all the spare parts? My A500 has been > in the shop for six weeks awaiting a new internal drive. > ..... > first brought his lemon 1080 monitor in for service on Jan 12. At present > he is still monitorless. > ..... > Both my machine and his monitor are "being repaired" under warranty. > With poor service such as this it's quite possible for your new amiga > to spend most (or all) of its warrantied life in the shop. How likely > is Commodore to extend warranties in cases like this? ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Listen to my poor story. I bought my AMIGA 500 on April 14. It was broken on April 23. It lived only 10 days! Terrible.Terrible.Terrible. One of the authorized repair shop near me seemed to be an abandoned house. It had no signs or anything. Just a dirty house. I didn't dare enter the place. Another shop had a sign "ATARI COMPUTER". Oh, well. I hope the guy knows what he is doing. The only other time I needed a warranty repair was when my stereo was broken. I called the repair shop. Then the guy DROVE to my house and fixed it in front of me. He put a new motor in the cassette deck. It took only 10 minuetes for him to fix it. Of course it was free. Well, the place was Tokyo and the company was SONY. H.Tsukada Dept.Math. Rutgers U. New Breunswick, NJ 08903
mclek@dcatla.UUCP (Larry E. Kollar) (05/04/88)
In article <May.1.15.04.04.1988.4561@math.rutgers.edu> tsukada@math.rutgers.edu (Haruo Tsukada) writes: >> Hey Commodore, where are all the spare parts? My A500 has been >> in the shop for six weeks awaiting a new internal drive.... >> ...With poor service such as this it's quite possible for your new amiga >> to spend most (or all) of its warrantied life in the shop. >In article <1921@ur-tut.UUCP> rhir_ltd@ur-tut (Bob Hirosky) writes: > >I bought my AMIGA 500 on April 14.... It lived only 10 days! > >One of the authorized repair shop near me seemed to be an abandoned >house. It had no signs or anything. Just a dirty house. I didn't dare >enter the place. >Another shop had a sign "ATARI COMPUTER". My 500 arrived with a dead serial port (you know a serial port is dead when you can't make the system echo through an echo plug). It was nearly a month after I brought the thing home that I discovered the problem while trying to hook up first a printer then a modem. I borrowed an echo plug from work before yelling for help. I don't have a weird system, just 1 Meg with 2 drives (PPS). It's been two weeks since I took the 500 in -- I'm hoping beyond hope that I'll have it back early next week (the eternal optimist). <<<SUN LAMP *ON* (deep tan)>>> I took a survey early this year (email me if you want the summary) on the reliability of the A500. Of the people who responded, HALF of them had some kind of problem under warranty! Let's assume that such surveys are biased toward people who have had problems, and the actual failure rate is 10%. Let's further assume that the average in-warranty repair bill is about $50 (probably low, since disk drive problems accounted for a large portion of the reported problems). That works out to $5 per machine! Doesn't sound like much, but multiply this figure by 100,000 Amiga 500s: Ouch! Commodore, you've GOT to start burning in your hardware before shipping it! I don't ask for anything fancy; just 24 hrs. in an 80-deg F. room while testing the various ports, displays, etc. would be just fine. You'd probably catch 95+% of the problem children, save yourself a bunch of cash, and have happier customers. <<<SUN LAMP *OFF*>>> I think I see where some of the extra cash spent on a Mac goes: faster repair. When the infamous Mac flyback transformer craps out a month after the warranty expires :-), well you're out $150, but you get your machine back in a day or so. The two Commodore-authorized repair centers I know of in the Atlanta area are run by a family or a group of friends, and they apparantly don't keep many spare parts in stock (and *any* time they need a part, it's back-ordered). For those of us experiencing that ugly sensation of Amiga-withdrawal, it's no fun. Is there *anyone* at Commodore who has the power to: 1) Set up and staff a burn-in/quality control center? 2) Set up and maintain a sufficient quantity of spare parts for repair centers? (#1 would make #2 *much* easier due to lower demand) I welcome any comments or flames from Commodore; just comments from anyone else. :-) Sorry this is so long; Amiga-withdrawal does that to you. :-( Larry Kollar ...!gatech!dcatla!mclek