Everex VS ALR

Post #319,964 by crazy 1/13/10 7:08:37 AM Reply	Everex VS ALR Wow! Me too. But in a different order. I bought the ALR dual CPU for a 30 person editorial division. Around 30 floppy disks to install SCO Xenix with the MPX extensions. It was the Compaq SystemPro rip-off. After 2 months it went back. The vendor burned a bunch of SCSI drives and cards. SCSI was new to them, badly terminated multiple configurations, sent them back. And then on the next set needed to be swapped (vendor burned them), I recieved the original burned ones back. I marked everything from that moment on. The thing would panic on heavy IO. Or when I looked at it poorly. When we gave up on that, we moved to the Everex Step Cube. Serial number 9. Created by hand, by loving lab techs. It was WONDERFUL. Then they offloaded the production to a real manufacturing site. Every cube produced after that moment SUCKED. Bus was not grouded properly, boards would fry. Not to me though. Whenever I called support with a problem, 1st I had to prove my system was actually made in-house. Then they'd give me a REAL tech. And then they'd fix the problem. Easily, or at least, with a good chance of happy resolution. They conferenced in people from SCO (when it was a decent company), and got 1-off MPX patches. If I had bought a later one, I'd have to swap the entire system out since they didn't trust them and would not waste their time with them.
Post #319,978 by Andrew Grygus 1/13/10 12:27:52 PM Reply	I sold a few MegaCubes . . . . . and a whole lot of Step desktops - enough to get an award from Everex. Unfortunately most of them went to one large company. The company had a branch office and wanted to install a Step there, but Everex refused to provide on-site service in Santa Barbara - too far from their nearest office. The company turned to another brand for all their computers. At about this time Everex went into serious decline.
Post #319,996 by crazy 1/14/10 6:24:08 AM Reply	They had very little remote physical techs They depended on vendors like you for the hands on. My vendor was IFFY. On the other hand, run through the typical vendors. Highend enough to play with the BLEEDING edge, inexepensive enough to want to buy the non-Compaq system-pro alternatives. This would be an aspiring vendor, someone who is willing to take a risk on Tier-2, unable (or unwilling) to qualify for Tier-1. The vendor in my area was about an hour away. They were N Jersey, I was S Jersey. There were no others that I was allowed to talk to, since I foolishly called them 1st. I would have preferred a PA/Philly area based vendor. At that point, a service call would cost serious money if I was paying for travel time. I wasn't. This was all included in the quite reasonable (as compared to CPQ) price. Which meant for every blip on this brand-new system (ALR in this case, but same vendor for the cube) would then trigger at least a day effort on the vendor tech's part. They must have lost serious money when trying to install it over 3 months. Did they call upon you to perform service calls on systems installed by some other vendor?
Post #320,063 by Andrew Grygus 1/15/10 12:37:55 PM Reply	No, they never called on me to perform service . . . . . on any systems. They were attempting to set up their own service structure here in Los Angeles and didn't want mere dealers horning in on their contracts.

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