timborn@ihlpg.ATT.COM (Tim Born) (09/16/87)
I recently purchased the Applied Engineering Z-card for my Apple ][+ w/ Sider as a replacement for my Microsoft look-alike which did not support the Sider. AE claims the Z-card works w/ the Sider. I'm looking for anyone who may have encountered this problem before. I need to know how to get around it - AE appears incapable or unwilling to provide support. Symptoms: I follow the installation instructions (to the letter, or any number of variations) but it still fails. The place it fails is during the APATCH12 program, shortly after it asks for a one liner to be executed on start up. The instructions indicate that the APATCH12 program is supposed to give a message like "PRESS RETURN TO REBOOT" and then everything is hunky-dory. I never get that message, and what's even stranger, the APATCH12 program is accessing the floppy drive and never touches the Sider. I would have expected it to write some changes on the Sider at some point. (Note: the Sider works - it has DOS, ProDos and UCSD up and running). Needless to say, my AE card isn't doing me much good. I've contacted AE seven times - five phone calls and two letters over a two month period. At one point they were able to duplicate the problem over the phone and agreed that some of the APATCH12 programs were flaky and I should send them my disk for a replacement, so I did. Now they have changed their mind, saying that they cannot reproduce the problem that they already demonstrated(!). No indication as to when a solution or a replacement disk would be forthcoming, and all this while my warranty is tick-tick-ticking away, and I'm not even able to use the Z-card. Bloody terrific. If anyone has a similar configuration and knows a work-around, I would be ever grateful. If anyone knows some magic for getting AE to respond to letters, that would be almost as good. Regards, Tim Born ...ihnp4!ihlpg!timborn
binder@fizbin.DEC.COM.UUCP (09/17/87)
Tim, I can't help with your problem, but I can ease your mind a little. Once you have applied for warranty service, your warranty coverage for that specific problem is frozen in time until the problem is resolved. That means that AE is bound to get you up and running, no matter how long it takes. Don't let them give you any crap about warranty expiration. Good luck, Dick Binder (The Stainless Steel Rat)