[ale] Slightly OT: Thrilled with 4AllMemory.com replacement

[Jim Kinney]

My first 16M dimm was deal of the month $499. The second was $79 a mere 14 months later. The third one, 16 months later was free with a $50 scanner.

I've had really good customer service from MicroCenter. BestBuy is at the opposite end of that spectrum. I won't set foot in there ever again.

I don't like to think about what I've spent on hardware over the years. I could be in a far larger house. The old saying "every computer I want is $5000" is no longer true for me. The last time I spec'ed out a box for me it was nearly $14k! Ok. So rackmount servers are overkill with dual Epyc CPUs and a total boat load of RAM, NVME, and a V100. But it's what I want!

On June 9, 2021 5:52:21 PM EDT, "Jon "maddog" Hall via Ale" <ale at ale.org> wrote:
>I (and I am sure I am not the only one) who have more stories about RAM
>and various companies that supplied them....but not always the RAM
>dealer themselves.
>
>As an example of that, I met a man who was replacing some bad RAM in a
>friend's PC, and I noticed that they turned off Parity checking in the
>BIOS even when the RAM itself supported it.   I asked him why he did
>that, and he explained that Parity checking only caused more people to
>bring their systems in to have RAM replaced.  Right.
>
>In the early 1980s I was a Unix systems administrator working at Bell
>Labs and I had six machines that each had one Megabyte of RAM in them
>(yes, you read that right) and I was asked what I would do to speed
>them up.   I said "Add more RAM" (up to a maximum of 4 MBytes).   Now
>DEC sold that RAM for 16 thousand dollars a MegaByte, so buying enough
>RAM to fill out the system was a lot of money.  My management balked.
>
>I looked into it and found out that other third party vendors were
>selling "DEC compatible RAM" for four thousand dollars a Megabyte, one
>fourth of what DEC sold it for.   I recommended that we buy from one of
>them.
>
>"WHAT?" my management said "How do we know that it will work?"
>
>I told them that if it did not work, these major companies (National
>Semiconductor was one of them) would not have any customer base.   And
>they had a money-back guarantee.
>
>So we started an RFP, and two vendors answered.  So I started
>haggling....er...ah..bartering...er..ah.negotiating.  First with one
>vendor, then the other.   Eventually I got the vendor down to two
>thousand a Megabyte...and the chips were socketed into the board, not
>soldered, so you could replace the chips if necessary.
>
>The second vendor came in for a final quote and when I told him the
>price there were tears coming out of his eyes and he said "NO, NO, he
>HAS to be selling them at a LOSS.   He can NOT be making money at that
>price."
>
>I just told the second vendor that "chips were chips" and we went with
>the lowest price.
>
>A year later I noticed that one of our machines was having a soft error
>on memory (it was ECC correctable) but all that came out was a number
>that supposedly represented the bit error.
>
>I called the vendor and he said "Yes, that is what it is, but we do not
>know how to relate that number to a chip in Unix."
>
>I told him that he should tell me the algorithm and I would write a
>program to tell what chip to replace.
>
>He said if I did that he would give me a lifetime of replacement chips.
>
>It took me a day to write the program.  When the operator saw the error
>message she would type in the number and the program would tell her
>what board, what row and what column the chip was in and she could
>replace it.
>
>Later that week I had a tube of replacement chips.
>
>Two years later we bought more machines and we needed more RAM.
>
>I called my supplier and said I wanted more RAM and I wanted it at the
>same price of 2K per Meg.
>
>He said "Why pay so much?".  I bought the next 12 Megs at 1k USD per
>Meg, no haggling...er..ah..negotiating involved.
>
>md
>> On 06/09/2021 4:28 PM Neal Rhodes via Ale <ale at ale.org> wrote:
>> 
>>  
>> Chivalry is not dead. 4AllMemory.com just replaced an 8GB RAM stick,
>no 
>> questions asked.
>> 
>> We bought it for a cheap ACER laptop about 3 years ago.   It worked
>ok 
>> at the time, but that computer had increasingly episodes of locking
>up 
>> with weird little funky skinny rectangles on the screen.   It got to
>the 
>> point of it not getting all the way through a reboot before it locked
>
>> up.
>> 
>> On a hunch, I stuffed the original 4GB back in.  (boy am I glad I cut
>a 
>> hole in the bottom of the case to facilitate RAM swaps...)  And it 
>> worked fine.
>> 
>> Friday before the recent holiday, I sent them an email describing
>just 
>> that, and asking what my options were.
>> 
>> I didn't hear back from them for about a week, so I called.  They
>said, 
>> "oh, we already shipped you a free replacement, and a return postage 
>> label to send that RAM back".
>> 
>> Sure enough, it arrived yesterday.
>> 
>> I guess us grey-beards remember back when suppliers treated us like 
>> honest adults.   And vacuum tubes hurt when you touched them too.
>> 
>> regards,
>> 
>> 
>> Neal
>> _______________________________________________
>> Ale mailing list
>> Ale at ale.org
>> https://mail.ale.org/mailman/listinfo/ale
>> See JOBS, ANNOUNCE and SCHOOLS lists at
>> http://mail.ale.org/mailman/listinfo
>_______________________________________________
>Ale mailing list
>Ale at ale.org
>https://mail.ale.org/mailman/listinfo/ale
>See JOBS, ANNOUNCE and SCHOOLS lists at
>http://mail.ale.org/mailman/listinfo

-- 
Computers amplify human error
Super computers are really cool
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://mail.ale.org/pipermail/ale/attachments/20210609/80efb5db/attachment-0002.htm>