WILLIAMS@UCF1VM.BITNET ("Erik WilliamUCF1VM.bitnet") (01/14/89)
In an age when a lot of people on the BBS's here in Orlando say that Atari ST support is eroding from the third party developers, I thought I would share an experience with Supra Corporation that shows that great support is still out there and Supra is not the only company out there with wonderful support. Here is the story: I had bought a Supra 30 Meg hard drive on September 24th, 1988 and had fun with the thing from the start. The clock battery had come to me DOA. No problem, the thing was in warranty and the problem fixed. All is going well until I get to North Carolina. My hard disk suffers a horrendous head crash on December 24th, the last day of the warranty period. Now, Fayetteville, NC does not have Atari Dealers and I really did not know how to send the thing back to Supra, so I figured that I would wait until I got back to Florida. My local dealer here in Orlando is Robert D. McDonald of McDonald's Computer Center. When I got back in Orlando on the 2nd, he was closed for inventory and the hard disk did not get to him until the 4th, about two weeks after the head crash and out of warranty. The drive was shipped off to Supra anyway with the Return Authorization number, everything. An employee of Supra called Mr. McDonald to ask why a drive was coming back out of warranty and he explained to her that the drive could not be shipped back earlier, but that it had failed during the warranty period and that I had contacted him during the warranty period. That was January 9th, 1988. My drive should be back on the 16th or 17th, fully repaired at no charge. I had no proof that the thing had failed during the warranty period (other than the fact that I wasn't lying about it) and they took care of the problem anyway and trusted me. I am a college student and couldn't afford to lay out three to four hundred bucks for a new mechanism anyway. I really appreciate support policies like this. I think that Supra should be commended for excellent services during this horrendous time without a hard disk. I hope that some of the people in Orlando's BBS nets see this message. The ST support arena is far from dead and will continue to live long past the time that ST's finally go out of production (just like the eight bits). Erik Williams University of Central Florida (WILLIAMS@UCF1VM.bitnet) Orlando, Florida Major: Electrical Engineering Eleven years a proud Atarian (Now with a Mega 2) and still going strong.