Subject: Re: Flyer: The bright side & Editors Message
From: [email-masked] (Scot Perry)
To: [email-masked]
Date: Mon, 31 Jul 1995 08:31:54 -0500

>>But that's the price of living on the edge of technology.

Andy Stevens problems should put John Grosss' problems into perspective.
I've used PC's for years branded systems to systems I've built myself. The
PC's greatest asset is its wide acceptance leading to an endless assortment
of available options but this is also it's greatest liability leading to
endless possibilities of incompatible boards drivers etc. Companies that
have Iron Fisted control over their Products Stifle growth and competition
but are better able to control compatibility problems. 

My Solution has been to try to stay away from unusual hardware even though I
may be tempted by price go with the well known branded products.  The more
popular and well distributed a product the more likely it has been tested
with other popular branded products. No name products will lead to early
hair loss and their will be no one to answer your questions or if their is
they probably don't speak english or at least english you can understand. If
your going to buy and plugin high end esoteric boards(relatively speaking
that is most people type letters and play doom on their PC's) than I
wouldn't buy mail order buy from a dealer who is comfortable with what your
going to plugin to your computer if he doesn't have a clue about high end
graphics and video cards he won't have a clue when an incompatibility will
arise. On the brighter side the PC hardware is better than its ever been the
advent of plug and play standards has greatly improved the situation.  If
your computer contains products that Microsoft has tested with NT you can
usually look forward to a flawless automatic installation. When I loaded NT
3.51 on my plug and Play 2.0 compatible Intel Motherboard with a mix of
50/50 plug and play and standard cards NT identified all cards plug and play
or not and loaded all pertinent drivers.

As to John's problem it sounded like a bad driver not hardware but since you
just complained about the hardware and never mentioned what you were
installing or your computer vitals it's hard to say. If you post the
specifics there may be some people out here who could help. The difficulties
you did mention with caching also usually points to driver problems or
driver SCSI controller(?) problems which I've seen many times on PC's. In
the software companies defense most NT drivers are intitial releases
therefore usually less than perfect like Lightwave on PC you can only hope
the software companies get well tested final releases out in a timely manner.

--
[email-masked] (Scot Perry) sent this message.
To Post a Message           : [email-masked]
Un/Subscription Requests To : [email-masked]
(DIGEST)                 or : [email-masked]
Administrative Items To     : [email-masked]