Re: Need somewhere to vent...

From: Bill Vermillion (bv_at_wjv.com)
Date: 10/09/04 

Date: Sat, 09 Oct 2004 13:15:01 GMT

In article <4167639f$0$447$a726171b@news.hal-pc.org>, james <at> wrote:
>asdf wrote:
>> Sorry... my wife wouldn't understand... I bought four Netgear
>> PS101 print servers. I planned on using them with samba and lpd
>> just like my intel netports. Real simple install... Just plug
>> in, load config software and configure. Well... the config sofware
>> doesn't see any PS101's at all so I call Netgear. The support
>> sounds to be in India. The first girl flat out refuses any tech
>> support till I register the product and call back. That gets me
>> ticked and I slam the phone down, register and call back. This guy
><snip>

>is there ANY company that still uses support in ENGLISH speaking
>countries for their ENGLISH speaking customers!?

Does the native language really have anything to do with the
intelligence of the support person? I've had some egregious
responses when all support of products was native to NA.

OTOH the only problem I've had with non-native English speaking
support is understanding the accent of the speaker and there was NO
problem at all with the technical support. That one involved
a bizarre failure in a Cisco router and when I called at 330AM
EST [US] to the 24 hour support line the support was in Belgium.
I would have to have him repeat some things a couple of times
but other than that no problem.

Support will depend upon the level the company perceives that it
needs to support. Companies such as Netgear [I'm not singling them
out] expect the majority of their support questions coming from
people who are using MS products and have the typical install
problems.

The OPs problem as I perceive it is that he bought FOUR of the
devices assuming they would work just like his Intel devices, and
did not buy ONE and test first.

Making assumptions on how something works in one product based on
another will get you into trouble quickly.

>best solution to the problem.. don't buy products from companies
>that don't care about their customers.

Correct. And never buy a quantity of a product until you test
at least one. The only problem I've had with the Netgear PS line
was when they changed the firmware and it would hang at random
times using netcat [aka nc]. That just spits raw data to
the IP and the port. When many had problems they went back to the
previous firmware revision, but the only option for those of us
with the shipped version was to buy another with the newer older
firmware, or live with it.

I've not had a problem with print servers following the
instructions - which on an non MS machine - usually meant
adding the MAC address to the ARP table, and then going to the
device and configuring it manually. But IF you MUST use the
the MS configuration tools perhaps you are better off with
something you can handle from the Unix side with no problems.

Bill 

-- 
Bill Vermillion - bv @ wjv . com

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