Re: Calling Customer Service for bad sectors

[Brad Miller <miller@CS.ROCHESTER.EDU>]

    Date: Mon, 21 Nov 88 10:12:44 CST
    From: forbus@p.cs.uiuc.edu (Kenneth Forbus)

    Sure.  The only reason I'm complaining is the hope that Symbolics will
    make available the materials we poor, broke university folk who cannot
    afford real maintenance contracts need to keep our machines running.
    Schematics for monitors and power supplies, for instance, would be
    real nice....

We have no problems with symbolics maintainance, and in fact find H/W
maintainance multiple times better than SUN, or even TI (who will only
handle problems thru the mail). But, we have full service. Are you aware
that Symbolics gives very substantial (like 50%) discounts to educational
institutions for MAs? Also we have a terrific CE (insert ataboy for Tom
Zullinger here) who probably should be running the show, but then we'd lose
him as our CE!

That's not to say I don't think what we pay on our 70 isn't outragous -- it
is, particularly considering it is no more than a 40 in a bigger cabinet (at
least, that's all it is at our site: we don't have color or other options
installed) yet costs almost double a 40. The price on our 20s is reasonable,
though....

I do agree that given that we've all bought the iron we should be entitled
to schematics, diagnostics, and anything else a CE gets. TI, for instance,
does document the hardware reasonably well, making local maintainance at
least possible. One can, 90% of the time, localize the problem to a board
level via a simple perusal of the manual set. Of course, on board hw
diagnostics help...

So, I'd suggest Symbolics send everyone breath-of-life tapes, the CE
diagnostic system, and the IFS tape constructor as part of the next
incremental release or ECO...

----
Brad Miller		U. Rochester Comp Sci Dept.
miller@cs.rochester.edu {...allegra!rochester!miller}