Uncreative Labs

Posted: Sun May 08, 2005 8:29 pm

Can you believe some repair shops refuse to work on computers that do not have XP installed? If Microsoft doesn't support it they don't either. That's just so stupid it's unbelievable!

Posted: Sun May 08, 2005 10:55 pm

Want a job? Go around to the repair shops, inquire as to their minimum system and if it's too high for you give them your business card and tell them to refer someone like that to you. (You may have to promise to direct the new systems to them.)

Posted: Mon May 09, 2005 2:29 am

That is stupid. To a limited degree I can agree with stipulations along these lines...I would never expect a modern repair shop to be proficient in fixing an IBM PC AT, for example, or something running an operating system like OS/2. But to me it would make no sense to refuse to accept a computer running, say, Windows 2000 instead of XP, or Windows 95 OSR2 instead of 98 or ME.

Joined: 02 Oct 2004 Posts: 594 Location: Western NC

Amazingly enough, a lot of repair shops I know of used to install W'98 to "cure" problems with machines running W'95. I made several bucks that way (fixing what they didn't)...

I'm sure some of them are doing the same with XP and be dammed with the product activation...

Posted: Mon May 09, 2005 2:35 pm

My machine isn't workin again. *User brings it back to shop*

*shop reinstalls OS, charges user $45 for "service call"*

Guest

on och i read about pc's found in dumpster behind repair shop.
I wonder what story was told to the owner?

I remember someone at intel pro telling me ( in 1989)
to "reset the cmos settings" on a genuine IBM XT.
he was senior to me and SHOULD have known.
my nephew switched a system from dos to wfwg and it barely ran ( what did they expecte from a 286-1- with 1 meg or ram.?
he knew almost nothing aboit pc's but was only comfortable with wfwg.
hopefully he has " grown" as he stopped at w 2000 not xp.
peope differ in their experience and outlook on life.
what makes sense to one ( or a company) is ridiculous to the rest of us.

Joined: 19 Oct 2004 Posts: 138 Location: Lynnwood,WA

wdegroot wrote:

on och i read about pc's found in dumpster behind repair shop.
I wonder what story was told to the owner?

I can't say for sure, but my guess is it was one of those so called "techies" who says "Well, it's a Pentium II, it's too old, We just got a new deal on the new Compy Pentium 4 with Windows XP installed and a full Office Suite for $500 bux". Personally, I'm rather sick of the "If this one little part is broken replace the whole dang system!" logic. My mom is perfectly happy with the Pentium 200 MMX I built her. I figured that the computer companies are giving out "benifits" to the amount of machines they can sell to these shops. Sure, $500 is relatively cheap, but if you think about it, a Sound Card is only $29 and possibly better quality than the new computer has (and probably has better support). Unless the CPU is skewered (the most expensive part in most cases), then just fix whatevers busted.

wdegroot wrote:

I remember someone at intel pro telling me ( in 1989)
to "reset the cmos settings" on a genuine IBM XT.
he was senior to me and SHOULD have known.

Shoot, I've worked with someone who's in IT who is also at least 30 (I'm 22) years older than me before, and this guy kept saying his replacement hard disks were bad, it just turned out that the jumpers were never set properly between the drive and cd-rom/other drive they were chained up to. It turned out all but 2 Hard Disks in the entire stack (around 12 of em') were bad once I swapped the jumpers.

wdegroot wrote:

my nephew switched a system from dos to wfwg and it barely ran ( what did they expecte from a 286-1- with 1 meg or ram.?
he knew almost nothing aboit pc's but was only comfortable with wfwg.
hopefully he has " grown" as he stopped at w 2000 not xp.
peope differ in their experience and outlook on life.
what makes sense to one ( or a company) is ridiculous to the rest of us.

That reminds me of the local thrift here who "re-builds" the computers they sell. They had a 486 system on the floor with a piece of paper on it that said "Needs Programmed", they were asking $40.00 for that one. On top was a Pentium system which was on but it had no monitor connected to it for some reason, $60.00, and then, the killer was next to it. They had a 1988 model Packard Bell Legend 286 running Windows 3.1 on 640K RAM (no more, no less), and what were they asking, EIGHTY, that's right $80.00!!! The hard disk was only 80 MB in size and was full to the brim with old programs, and it was the ONLY PC in the store with a 1.2 MB 5.25" floppy drive on it. You'd think that would have been a sign this was not a fairly recent machine.

Joined: 04 Oct 2004 Posts: 114 Location: ~/

I have a high density 5.25" floppy drive in my Athlon's ATX tower case, though it's not connected or powered and is now full of dust since I never use it anymore. Wink

Joined: 19 Oct 2004 Posts: 138 Location: Lynnwood,WA

ß wrote:

I have a high density 5.25" floppy drive in my Athlon's ATX tower case, though it's not connected or powered and is now full of dust since I never use it anymore. Wink

My machine has one in waiting. I have plans to hook up some special SCSI Adapter device that I've been told about for floppy drives so I can use it again, heck knows, maybe I can have a software option to boot from it, that would rock, it would make my computer almost 100% reverse compatible.

Joined: 02 Oct 2004 Posts: 377 Location: Stuttgart, Germany

I have a 5.25" drive as a: in my athlon xp 2600+ xp and I can even boot from, it ( just set the bios to boot from it).

Joined: 19 Oct 2004 Posts: 138 Location: Lynnwood,WA

I've given much throught to doing it that way, but I' prefer A 1.44M 3.5" to be the primary floppy drive most of the time (easier to get disks for), I just like to have the 5.25" for some of the older 360K/1.2M bootable media, espeically with that pile of 500 give or take a couple 360K unformatted DSDD diskettes I have around. My workaround for it was to put a 360K in my 486 as drive B:. Unfortunatley, it seems the majority of Micro-ATX boards out there don't support dual floppy drives anymore. Hmm, maybe when/if EFI comes out....

Guest

am i wierd- don't answer--
putting a 1.44 ( and 720k disks) in a xt or clone?
it works.
apparently, from a story from an old pc world, the xt accepted an 80 track drive, it formatted the disk as a 360k 40 track. but it will boot from a properly formatted 80 track 720k floppy ( dos and an app on the same disk)
it was a BIOS THING.
however , early ibm at's did NOT support the same thing. even tho at's supported the 1.2 drive. this is not me saying it but an expert in a letter to pc world, and presumably tested before publication by the magazine.
I just used the ability to set up and install things on old xt's when it was not conveniebt to add a 5.25" drive to my 386 or early 486 system.

of course, I used 1.44 and 1.2 and even a 80 track (cp.m??) 720k 5.25" drive with a xt floppy card with a bios. the cpm drive was never happy and I could never find totally dependable disks for it. it didn't like 1.2 disks and using 360k disks was ":streching it" also niosy.
to use a 1.44 as a 720k in an xt, just plug it in. to format floppies ( 720k)
it is necessary to use drivparm ( same context as drover.sys
except device=driver.sys ///stuff and drivparm= ///stuff ( switches)
suggest dos 3.30 as the best.