orig date 10/07/85 A few weeks ago I wrote up an experience I had concerning PC's Limited in Austin, Texas. It concerned the total lack of satisfaction I experienced from them concerning a 20MB drive we purchased to use on an IBM fixed disk controller card. Well, they have done it to us again and I just couldn't help but think that you might be interested in hearing what happened this time. Before you say to yourself, "It serves him right, he shouldn't have ordered anything from them after his first experience.", please let me tell my tale. To begin with, the PC TURBO - the star of this story - was already on order when we experienced the initial problems with PC's Limited. For those of you who have not heard, the PC TURBO is PC's Limited "IBM compatible" computer selling for $795 with 640K of RAM and a single disk drive. It also has a high-speed mode of 8 mhz. Like the XT, it offers 8 expansion slots. Why, even Jim Seymour had even recently written a sparkling article in PC WEEK on this large advertiser's wonderful new computer. It just had to be good! Sound too good to be true? It is. We ordered the PC TURBO and were told that it would arrive at our doorstep in a week or so. Two weeks later, we called to see where it was. Well, there had been some problems with the motherboard and deliveries had been delayed. We should expect the machine in about a week. A week later it still had not arrived. Finally, four weeks after the initial order, the TURBO arrived. We eagerly unpacked it, plugged in an IBM monochrome card & display and powered it up. Well, its self test acknowledged 256K of memory (isn't it supposed to have 640K?) and it booted. DOS came up fine, but we only had 256K. Our experienced IBM-trained technician took a look at this unusual motherboard and perused the entire 8.5" x 11" page of system documentation (yes, just one page!) for the proper switch settings. Everything seemed to be ok. Looking closely at the chips, we indeed had two sets of 256K chips and two sets of 64K chips on the board. Wait a minute! Four or five of these chips are not seated properly in their sockets. The pins were badly bent. We carefully extracted them, straightened the pins, and reseated them into their sockets. This got us to thinking if the power-up self test worked, as it hadn't discovered these "bad" chips. Hmmm. Ok, let's try it again. Still no luck, the little counter on the power-up self test counted to 256 and booted. Time to call PC's Limited and see what to do next. The documentation mentioned nothing about the three jumpers on the motherboard, or the two banks of switches next to the RAM. These switches were labeled, however. They said: 256 odd 640 even. We interpreted this to mean that all the even switches were to be set on for 640K, which they were. We called a technician at PC's Limited and described our problem. They told us to check and be sure the evenly numbered switches next to the RAM were set on and the odd switches off. They were. They said then to check for a jumper somewhere under the disk drive and be sure it was set for 640K. When asked for a better description of this jumper, he said that that was impossible to do because he wasn't sure which version of the motherboard we had. (Which version we had?!!!) Uh oh. We would have to pull the motherboard to get to it, but it would be clearly labeled. We pulled the motherboard (thank goodness for our IBM-trained technician) and found a jumper clearly labeled: 1 3. That is clear! It sure was a long shot from: 256 640. Well, it was set to 1, so we switched it to 3 (after all 3 is larger than 1). We reinstalled the motherboard, plugged everything back in, and powered up. Success! It now counted to 640 on the power-up self test! That was a simple three hour fix! So far, so good. I loaded up some software on the hard drive and Lotus ran fine. So did WordStar. "Great," I thought, "this is going to be just fine now." I did about two hours worth of work with Lotus and everything was fine. I then slipped a diskette into drive a: to copy my new files from drive c: so I could bring them upstairs for printing. A friendly message came back from DOS: "General failure writing drive a" Abort, Retry, Ignore? I tried another diskette. Same problem! Damn. Two hours worth of work and my new PC TURBO is giving me disk drive problems. I immediately called for our technician. Stu came running downstairs and took off the cover. He studied the drive carefully and we pondered swapping it out for another. He had never seen a floppy disk controller like the one in this computer and eyed it suspiciously. Then he burst forth, "I found it! They didn't put a terminator chip on this drive!" Feeling very proud of himself, Stu went to pull a termintor chip off another drive we had and slipped it into its socket. We inserted a diskette and it wrote to that diskette like the best of them. Think of this: the drive read from the disk, but it would not write! Who but a technician would think to check for a terminator chip. I sold IBM PC's for three years and must have set up over 1,000 of them, but I didn't think of the terminator chip! Imagine the feeling a novice would have. Anyway, our problems had to be over now, right? Wrong. The next thing I wanted to do was to key in a little BASIC program I found in PC Magazine. I loaded up a copy of Compaq BASIC into the TURBO and entered my program. After it was entered, I typed RUN. It came back with "Syntax error." I double checked the program and all was fine. The first statement of my program used the OPEN command to open a .COM file that the program would create. The TURBO DID NOT RECOGNIZE THE BASIC COMMAND "OPEN" using Compaq BASIC! A little further exploration revealed that it also did not recognize other commands, including "NEW"! I couldn't believe this. I have never found a clone that won't run Compaq BASIC. This is too much. What else can go wrong? Unfortunately, plenty. As a consulting group specializing in local area networks, our next test was to install the PC TURBO as a node in our office network. We run a Novell ArcNET system and had specifically purchased the TURBO to be a low-cost workstation. We installed the ArcNET card, connected the cable, and booted from the standard boot diskette. We soon received a Novell message that claimed the network was not available, or we had a cable connection problem. We switched cards, hoping we just had a bad ArcNET card. No chance. Same problem. Stu got back on the phone with PC's Limited and described the problem to their "head technician." Now this is almost as funny as it is sad. This individual began by saying that he had never heard of Novell. He said that the only thing we could do would be to call Novell and see if they could help. He was sure they would be aware of any problems their network would have with PC's Limited PC TURBO. Can you believe this? He also indicated that there had been other callers complaining of compatibility problems, and in some cases a different version of the motherboard had corrected the problem. However, because he didn't know anything about Novell, he wasn't sure what he could to for us, as he couldn't guarantee that another motherboard would solve the problem. Another version of the motherboard? Other compatibility problems? Never heard of Novell? Boy, are we in trouble! So much for this IBM "clone." When Stu told this head technician that we simply wanted to return the computer, he asked if we had it for longer than 30 days (thank goodness the answer is no!). He informed us, as we had been informed when we had the hard disk problem, that we would have to pay a 10% restocking penalty if we wished to return it. We are now pondering the next step we will take. I know that others have lawsuits out against PC's Limited, and I am feeling as though we may join them. After spending over four hours repairing this new machine, finding it does not work with a Novell network, and being told that in order to return it we will be penalized 10% of the purchase price (not to mention shipping charges both ways), I have had it with this company. Never again will we purchase anything from PC's Limited. Don't say you haven't been warned. I thought of waiting before writing this piece to see what else goes wrong, but I am sure that we are not going to give the TURBO another chance to fail us. Please drop me a line if you have had similar problems (or positive experiences) with this or other companies. I am attempting to establish my BBS as a consumer awareness information center. I wonder what I should charge them for fixing their computer? Scott Maentz, Sysop New England PC BBS (413) 357-8809 1200/2400 baud ID0004 - Gene Plantz's IBBS g their computer? Scott Maentz, Sysop New England PC BBS (413) 357-8809 1