elliott@veronica.cs.wisc.edu (James Elliott) (03/03/91)
With all the speculation about Jasmine service problems on the net, I thought I'd share a recent experience of my own, which was positive. I have long needed more disk space on my SE (I have an internal Apple 20 meg drive and that's all), but on a student's shoestring budget I've been holding off on buying anything. I saw the ads in MacWorld for the Jasmine "portable" 40-meg drive for $299, and I could just rationalize the expense, so I ordered one. The drive was attractive, small, and fast, and came with a lot of PD, shareware and demo software. One feature that was not obvious from the advertising, however, was that it lacks a power supply. It is powered by the external floppy port. This made it a little less portable than I hoped, since I wanted to be able to hook up to some Mac IIs that I also use, and that would require purchasing a $50 external power adapter. A few days after acquiring the drive, the directory clearly was seriously corrupted. I thought it might be some sort of software incompatibilty, though my internal drive was still quite happy. In trying to reformat it, I got increasingly severe error messages, and finally was forced to conclude that there was something wrong in hardware. I called the service number (not the one in the nice manuals, which had been disconnected, but the one on a single-page insert). The person who answered made an appointment for a tech to call me back the next day. They did, and upon hearing the problem description, told me to ship the drive back to them. They gave me access to their FedEx shipper number so that they could pay the cost. Two weeks later, the drive was returned to me. Their diagnosis was that I must have been wrong in removing the terminator that I did (the otherwise clear documentation was a bit out of synch with their current terminator setup). The drive checked out fine at their end. And indeed, it seemed to work fine again, and they'd restored all the software originally provided. But again after a short time things were getting corrupted and hardware diagnostics were failing. My hypothesis now was that I was suffering from power problems; my SE's power supply was unable to power the internal hard disk, plus the Irwin accelerator board, 4 meg of RAM, and their external hard drive all at once. The techs again called me back in one day after I made an appointment, and agreed with this hypothesis. They offered to sell me the external power adapter, but for an additional $50, I could find a self-contained 40-meg drive with a Quantum or Seagate mechanism, so I decided that their drive was not quite appropriate for my needs, and asked for an RMA so I could have my money returned. They cheerfully assigned me one, and once again paid for the shipping. A week or so later, a credit showed up on my Visa account for the full amount that they had originally billed me, including shipping and handling. So, I was able to try their drive and, even though it ended up not being right for me, I only paid for two one-minute phone calls to California. I was quite impressed with their timely support, and their friendly and comprehensive return policy. I will happily do business with them again, when they have a drive that suits my needs. -- Jim Elliott "Like a bridge he'll come between us, not a wall" elliott@veronica.cs.wisc.edu