On Mon, 29 Nov 1999, Michael DeMan wrote:
Some cover next day, some don't. I paid for one last year, but didn't get next day hardware replacement - had to shell out another $270 over the phone.
I've found it's cheaper to have a spare on hand rather than wait for someone to ship me one. It gives me a test bed to work with and a bare minimal down-time when troubleshooting proves a hardware failure. Then again, when you're big enough to need spares (i.e. you have enough customers that you don't want to tick off because of "excessive down-time" and you don't want to give customers extra time credit on their accounts). Let's face it - failures happen. Spares are essential to getting back up quickly in the event of a hardware failure. It's also an excellent troubleshooting tool if you have a known good to compare versus a questionable piece of hardware. We allow our warranty hardware support to take care of hardware failures and handle having spares on hand ourselves. For us, having spares on hand was more of a long-term investment than a short term expenditure. Just to keep from having to worry about re-registering every 90 days for warranty support for software, we have a software contract which gives us access to tech's when we need it 9-5. That takes some expertise on our part for the rest of the day, but considering that our lifeblood is based on whether or not these things work, our techs have gotten to know these things quite well - at least enough to know whether a problem is hardware or software.
This part of the USR/3COM racket is the most outrageous. I've been very happy with the HiperARC but the amounts of money they charge for support - which includes items like the latest firmware! - is just outrageous. I agree with you on dropping them entirely because of this issue.
Be sure to let them know - each and every one of them - when you're resolving this that you are definitely not the only one that feels like this and that they're going to be out of business at the rate they're going because of stupid & greedy policy.
I'll leave that one alone... different "religous" discussion... My 2 cents... :) Kevin Benton SOTA Technologies, A Voyager.net Company E-Mail: s1kevin@tims.net Web: http://users.sota-oh.com/~s1kevin/ Unsolicited advertisements processing fee: $50 subject to change without notice - To unsubscribe to usr-tc, send an email to "majordomo@xmission.com" with "unsubscribe usr-tc" in the body of the message. For information on digests or retrieving files and old messages send "help" to the same address. Do not use quotes in your message.