uccjcm@ecsvax.UUCP (John McLendon) (08/16/89)
My company recently purchased some upgrade boards from Dtack for our
HP 9000/360's. We were given the understanding that these boards
are "field upgradable" and in fact paid a slightly higher price for
having socketed memory. The total capacity of the boards is 16 meg
and we bought them with 8 meg installed. Well, we ran into a situation
on one of the machines where we felt more memory was necessary, and installed
more chips, booted the machine, and found that the board ignored the added
memory. Quick call to Dtack... turns out we need a rom upgrade for the
board to handle the new memory... no problem... how much is it?
$3700 for each 4 meg increment of rom!!!!!
This is even if we buy the memory chips ourselves! ($1500 current market
for 4 meg). Now I will admit that the boards were still cheaper than HP,
but charging $3700 for a rom/pal/whatever (== 50 cent chip) for something
that is advertised as "field upgradable" strikes me as extortion.
And then I read an article in a magazine about HP compatible upgrades
and the same old line is given... field upgradable blah,blah,blah.
The fact is, that is if we buy fully loaded boards from Dtack, we only
save about 15% over HP! Other vendors have boards for substantially
cheaper. I would like to solicit comments about two things:
Do you think it is dishonest to represent something as customer upgradable
when the product so clearly requires the vendors intimate and continuing
involvement in what is advertised as a solution that the customer can
utilize independant of the vendor (given the vendors initial solution).
Am I way off base here? (caveat emptor)
We are considering severing our ties with this company altogether
based on this incident. We are addressing our concerns to persons in this
company, but I thought it might be enlightening for the users
of HP 9000's as well as for myself (assuming I receive replies).
Use email please (I will summarize if interest great enuf...)
John...
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Signed: John McLendon uunet\
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