 The magazine of the Melbourne PC User Group Editorial Ash Nallawalla ash@melbpc.org.au |
 |
It can be difficult to pay extra for an intangible such as "better service" or "Australian Made." When you buy a Microsoft product, which supports over 250 Australian Microsoft employees, (not to mention thousands of others who add value in many other ways) is that "better" or "worse" than buying a product from a small company that appears to be entirely Australian? When I lived in WA some 14 years ago, locals were bombarded by advertising that urged Sandgropers to "look for the birthmark" (a logo in the shape of the state) on merchandise. At other times we are urged to buy something because it is not imported. For all I know, those "Queensland" bananas might well come from a property owned by foreign interests.
I think that few consumers give importance to the place of origin or the implied support behind the name. Price is often the only determinant.
In the personal computer marketplace we have seen a large number of "box movers" come and go. Some are backyard operators in the kindest sense, others have lavish shop fronts and advertise in the weekly papers but disappear within a year or two.
Recently on Usenet there was discussion about a Melbourne dealership that had closed down and had left a few unhappy customers. Some other anecdotes were shared by Fidonet BBS users including a comment that rang true for me. Someone said that he looked for the cheapest prices in the papers and had been burnt because his dealer had sold him a PC with cheap, 8-bit memory that had no parity checking. When the PC began to play up he wasted time with software analysers that failed to detect the faulty memory chips. Then he discovered that the dealer had closed down. He took it all in with good grace, admitting that he had finally paid the real price of buying for price, not value.
Recently I had the opportunity to visit an old acquaintance of mine. I needed a basic sound card in a hurry and decided to visit
Muirfield Computer Services (MCS), which is situated in my suburb of Werribee. It is run by former Melb PC member Colin Muir and his family. I knew Col mainly in the context of our shared hobby of amateur radio and our common former employer, the RAAF. Ten years ago he used to sell and repair PCs literally from his garage. I knew he had opened a computer store some years ago but this was to be my first visit.
The visit was brief because Colin wasn't there. He runs the "factory" at Hoppers Crossing, the next suburb, and off I went. Factory? A Hewlett-Packard in the making? The factory turned out to be four adjoining warehouses packed to the gills with new and old equipment. I was shown around the facility by Col who explained that he tried to buy "nearly one of everything in case we need an obsolete part one day". His staff includes many ex-RAAF technicians, some of whom are also radio amateurs. I don't recall at which point I became very impressed; perhaps it was when I heard that our very own Tom Coleman was known to visit the premises. What's so impressive about all this, you might ask.
Yes, I could have bought the same sound card 20 km away for $5 less, but I got some cheap speakers "thrown in". While I was chatting to Col another customer was buying an internal modem, and it was pointed out to him that "the mod" had been performed on it. What modification? To cut a long story short, the Maestro RC224FM internal fax/data modem fails to work in fax mode on the newer, faster PCs. Many 486 DX PCs and the occasional 386/16 SX present a timing "challenge" to an octal bus transceiver chip in the modem. MCS substitutes it with a 74LS245 unit before selling the modem.
A few days later I was asked to repair a friend's PC. QAPIus failed to identify the problem and I wasted money buying one unnecessary RAM SIMM (because QAPlus twice diagnosed faulty RAM but passed it several times thereafter.) The PC's BIOS memory parity error check had been disabled. I enabled the check and the test failed immediately. Aha, the old cheap, 8-bit RAM trick. By this stage I had dismantled the PC completely and could probably reassemble it while blindfolded. The real problem turned out to be a broken contact in the third SIMM socket, and I discovered that desoldering the socket was not within my capabilities. Off to MCS I went and asked for a used 386/16 SX motherboard. Before he would sell it to me, the employee asked me why I wanted to replace the motherboard. What was the exact error message? Did it say "System Halted"? Yes, he agreed, the broken socket problem was best fixed with a $50 motherboard. I am pleased to have such a knowledgeable dealer in my neighbourhood even if his prices are not rock-bottom.
Internet Service
As this issue goes to press in mid-April, we have not mailed out the completed forms to the 300 lucky subscribers. The donated modems have not arrived and the DigiBoard driver has not been debugged (Andrew had to write one.) Just as we had resigned ourselves to start the service with just one line rather than hold back our anxious subscribers, the home partition crashed and we lost the home directories. Not the passwords and user records, thank heavens. Over 100 subscribers attended the Comms and UNIX SIGs last month and witnessed an excellent preview arranged by Keith Owens, Grant Fink and Phil Lew. Sorry, but we cannot take on any more subscribers. At this date the AARNet volume charging situation is still unclear and we can only handle one crisis at a time.
When melbpc is opened up for use, testbox will be decommissioned. It has served its purpose of giving members a taste for the Internet so accounts on it will be closed.
Reprinted from the May 1994 issue of PC Update, the magazine of Melbourne PC User Group, Australia
