Archive of UserLand's first discussion group, started October 5, 1998.
Re: I resign as a Compaq customer
Author: calvin@xmission.com Posted: 8/26/1999; 6:37:57 PM Topic: Next clonemaker, Compaq Msg #: 10057 (In response to 10008) Prev/Next: 10056 / 10058
I resigned as a compaq customer a while ago. The machines were just flaky. (comcrap).My company has been using dells for restaurant POS machines. They run win95 and 9 out of 10 are usually good. But, I've received whole shipments missing modems, an essential piece of hardware for my business. Of those 5 machines I've had problems with 2. I've had problems adding hardware to them (although the case design is nice).
I've used compaq's in stores and had similar problems. Though I use a compaq at my desk running win95 that needs to be booted daily...sometimes 3 or 4 times.
the best machines I have ever used, still running 7 years after they have been installed, are IBMs. My own personal recommendation to any business is to buy IBM. And not a low end machine, but something a little bit more substantial. Oh, I take it back. I have a server polling some stores thats a 386 with microchannel and a scsi card and it's giant. I think it's probably 10 years old.
I hate NT. It's always been difficult to install and configure (and if something changes it freaks out). I've stopped using my NT servers for printing, for DHCP, for anysort of store polling. Everything is going to linux or directly to my AS/400 (IBM again).
I did buy a dell server for Linux. I spent 4k, which includes a rocket port serial card ($800). It came, I installed the card myself (they were supposed to do that). But it booted up with Linux pre-installed. It works wonderfully, but I haven't tried to configure or use the serial card yet.
However, I attribute the ease of setup to Red Hat 6. I put red hat 6 on my home server. It is a little HP I originally got from Onsale with WinNT Wkstn. I replaced it with RH5.1. I upgraded it to RH6.0 and everything went perfectly, glitchless. That has NEVER happened with NT.
I'll be upgrading my current dialup linux box at work to RH6.0 soon, and expect it to work like a charm. It's an IBM.
The most reliable machines I've used have been IBMs, regardless of the operating system (Win95,WinNT, OS/2, DOS, Linux) they run.
As a side note I have been pretty happy with the HP's I've purchased (about 6).
-calvin
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