My AmigaOne Experience

[Wilse]

I simply stated that I am starting to understand why Seehund has been screaming about the licensing scheme for all this time, it is silly.

Well, it's probably the only income stream Amiga Inc will have for the forseeable.

OTOH, if they go under.....

Anyway, we're veering OT.  ;-)

>When I explain I'm novice and cannot do the job, and they dont
>do it then its their fault not mine because I had already
>explained that I was incapable of doing the job.

Then you shouldn't have tried.

Besides, are you also incapable of finding someone who IS capable of doing the job?? You don't have to be an Amiga nut to mess with Linux, and surely there are Lubix users somewhere in your general vicinity. And surely some electronics guy or PC repair guy is capable of changing a ROM chip, they don't have to be Amiga people to know how to do that either.

Sory dude, but you've had almost a year to return this thing as defective. You waited far too long, and did something to it that you should not have even considered trying being such a novice and all. I just find it difficult to feel sorry for you.

I broke my Prometheus PCI adaptor last weekend. You don't see me complaining that Matay should have included more static electrcity protection, or protection for whatever else I may have done to the thing, carrying on in front of everyone do you? I broke it. My fault. Not theirs. I'm buying a new one.
In your case, you broke it. YOUR FAULT. Not theirs.

I've never had bad support from Eyetech, and find Alan's response at ann.lu to be quite believable, it sounds like they did more for you than I'd expect them to help me with. To see you blaming them for something you should have returned long ago, and blame them for causing you to break it in the manner than you did, just looks silly.

>In retail, especially with such extremely high markups, there
>should be the expectation that X amount will be returned. That
>is just the reality behind retail.

Of course, this is true. So true, than in USA the income tax forms for companies have a line to say how much money you "lost" due to returns, and this number subtracts off your total income, you don't pay company income tax on sales income items returned to you.

But, at the same time, there should not be an expectation of x number units per year will have some kid that doesn't know anything about computers (or his equally in-experienced dad) ripping sockets off computer boards with screwdrivers wanting full refunds for their failure to have an experienced person do it for them.

Like my broken Prometheus card, I cannot expect Matay to come visit me in USA every time I rearrange my pile of computers to ensure that I haven't done anything wrong or forgot to ground myself to remove static electricity, or that my 90 degree zorro adaptor (unknown to Matay and of course unsuported by them) is made properly and won't cause a short, or that my installation with shich doesn't cause Promy to short against case metalwork or anything like that. Matay has no reason to expect me to do such possibly destructive things. All they should expect of me is me to pay for repair of my mistake, whatever it was, or buy a new one, which I am already ordering.

Now, Eyetech did send him the parts and instructions, and mention that most people are able to figure it out. Problem with "foolproof" documentation and easy work, whoever made the word "foolproof" vastly underestimated the fools. Thus guy and/or his dad apparently was genuinley not up to the task. Eyetech should have offered for him ship the thing back to them and have them do the ROM swap. I'm not saying Eyetech should have paid shipping, but also not saying they should not have paid, not my problem, most of my own comparable situations customer ALWAYS pays return to company, company ALWAYS pays return to customer, not sure if it works the same in UK or Europe or anyone else, and this in USA is still more of a company policy being very similar between companies, not any legal requirement.

But in the end, it was the customer's decision what to do. Do I ship it to Eyetech for work done? Do I call local experienced people for help? The customer knew how muchthe board cost. The customer knew he didn't know how to do this chip swap. The customer knew he was afraid of breaking something. The customer knew what the risk was here. The customer accepted the risk, end of story. Eyetech should not have to expect this problem, they should expect that people unable to do this will ship it in to have it done, or find someone else experienced to do the work. This someone else may or may not guarantee his work, if not then the customer must again choose to accept the risk or not, this isn't Eyetech's fault. The busted board would ONLY be Eyetechs fault at this point of Eyetech themselves had broke it.

>Also upon reflection it does seem quite impossible to rip out a rom socket with a paper clip.

Depends on the type of socket. If it's PLCC style, sure it can be done. I once pulled a PLCC of some sort with a paperclip. Bent it onto a V shape, and made short curls on the tips to grip under the chip with. Slid the two ends down the PLCC corner slots, squeezed the ends together and pulled up, chip popped out. If it was a DIP style, then no a paperclip wouldn't be ideal. Not sure what style AmigaOne has as I don't have mine yet, but you'd still have to be more than novice to build your own PLCC tool from a paperclip, but then you shouldn't be doing the work yourself anyway.

OK, my previous posts on the toppic show I think the customer should have had enough common sense to leave the thing alone himself and get someone with experience to help. He has of course now been delivered this knowledge by a big virtual Clue-By-4.

Now, if Eyetech won't repair it (even if you offer to pay) , I offer to try. I make no guarantee to success as I don't know for sure if it can be done, perhaps a pic by email could help (good clear closeup of the damage froma couple angles). My offer - I'll fix the thing, you pay to ship it to me in USA, I pay shipping to return it to you. I'll pay for any parts required that are reasonably easy to deal with, such as sockets, solder, etc. If it's a broken northbridge chip, or other such large thing neesing replaced, I'm not equipped to do that work, I'm assuming it's just the ROM socket and lifted wires neding some rework, and this is all I'll pay for.

OK, who am I? Why should you trust me? Good questions. I've upgraded a couple Cyberstorm MK2 050 CPU cards to use 060 chips. A couple people have sent me their boards for this work, and been happy with the results, people from outside USA, a project I figured out how to do by myself as Phase 5 wouldn't even respond to my requests to pay them for the job on my wn board. I have a degree in computer engineering from Rochester Institute of Technology in New York state USA. I work at Forefront Technologies on the Radeon driver project. Bill Toner's the name, you decide if you'd consider trusting me or not. Again there is risk involved, I may not be able to fix it, there's some statistical possibility that it might somehow get worse, but I'm willing to try. Regardless of if I fix it or not, it will be returned to you at my cost for return shipping/insurance.  Now, I don't have any OS disks, and don't know much about instaling Linux myself, I'm not personally involved in Forefront's AmigaOne sales. I only will try to get the thing to try and boot, show any meaningful signs of life, etc. If you want I'll try to get Linux doing somethng too, but don't make any guarantees whatsoever about that, just the board/socket repair attempt.
And it of course may take a while to get to as I'm busy with other things, but will get to it as soon as I can if you would try this offer.

Again, while breaking something that expensive must suck, I can't find Eyetech at fault for the damage. But for kicks (I like to solder) I'll offer this for my own educational experience in trying to repair such a hardware problem.

[Madgun68]

I'm stepping in a little late, but in my opinion the user is in the wrong here regardless of which story is more accurate.

If Eyetech really did offer to do the rom swap themselves, a simple phone call to them could have resolved the misunderstanding. It's bad enough that the user tried to do the rom swap when they knew they didn't feel up to the job, but going ahead with it when you have unclear instructions too?

Honestly, there were plenty of options available to you: Friends (more technically savvy), user groups, the support mailing list, computer shops or even Eyetech themselves.

I think this is something to be chalked up as one of those bad learning experiences and move on. It certainly is not the fault of Eyetech that someone did something against their own judgement.

[Wilse]

Looking at the offers to repair this board, pretty much free of
charge, I have to say I'm once again impressed by the kindness of the
people in this community.

I hope you take up one of these offers.

@everyone who offered to help the guy - hat's off to you! :pint:

[eric5h5]

Can we clear some things up here?  I've got an A1G3SE direct from Eyetech, and from the dates given, I'd guess it's from the same batch that the OP got his from. There are no particular hardware problems, and I find it unlikely that his board was actually physically defective either. Software problems, yes, but that was to be expected, and this was explicitly stated.

Some people who are trying to confuse the issue should be reminded that, at the time, you could *only* get these things from Eyetech. There was no way to avoid knowing about the potential problems. None, no excuses. You had to work a bit to order one at all--it's not like you could walk into just any computer store and have them shoved in your face. That's still the case, and the software problems seem to be gone now.

Since my Amiga motherboard died a few weeks ago, I've had to use the AmigaOne as my main machine. (I do have an A1200, but it won't work with my accelerator so it's not much use to me at this point for anything other than old games. Which is fine, but it doesn't get any work done!)  The worst I can say is that Konquerer has bombed out a few times.  Since it's *only* Konquerer, and nothing else, that rather rules out hardware issues, wouldn't you say?

As has been pointed out, having a clue was in fact required for the early buyers, and to a lesser extent is still required now. You *can* and will mess things up by screwing around with stuff you don't understand. This does not mean that the hardware is broken or defective. What's kind of pathetic is that physically removing the ROM chip probably wasn't even necessary.  I'm 99% sure that it could have been flashed, like I did mine.  This is a fairly easy procedure, but again, it requires at least a small clue. I suppose in this case, they couldn't or didn't want to do it for whatever reason.

For the people saying, "the customer is always right"...well, yes, that's why this guy got the board in the first place, isn't it?  Apparently against Eyetech's better judgement. What would you have them do, refuse to sell to certain people they think might be too stupid? Do you have any *IDEA* the screams of outrage that would provoke?  And rightly so!

I suppose Eyetech probably isn't the very best company in the entire world, but it's *miles* above the situation we had with Phase 5. (Who delivered to me a non-functional CyberstormPPC, took months and months to repair it, and then had the nerve to charge me for repairs to a board that was defective when I got it.) Anyone who has a problem with Eyetech in this situation *obviously* only has an axe to grind and no logical reason for it.

--Eric