Tom Brandt wrote:
>
> I had used Hardwarehouse, liked them, and wondered why they dropped their
> HP equipment seemingly overnight.
>
> At 05:41 3/23/99 -0800, Shawn Gordon wrote:
> >Check out http://www.hp.com/pressrel/mar99/19mar99.htm if you haven't
> >already seen.  This is sad for folks in my area because Abtech was a real
> >quality reseller, the support was top notch and the machines always looked
> >like new.
> >

Dodged that bullet. We just got a Jamaica enclosure with 4 lowpro 4GB
hot-swappable drives and dual hot-swappable power supplies from ABTech.
They even sent out a tech to install it. All for about $5500.

I remember from the "crisis" my previous employer had 18 months ago. Our
3000/958 had it's Floating Point Coprocessor go bad. Unfortunately the
3rd Party Hardware Maintenance company (who shall remain nameless) was
(rumored to be) playing the "commodity" game and had sold their only 958
board. They tried 3 times to send an HP9000 board. Since it was
"undoctored", it failed to IPL. After the second bad board, we put a
tiny ink mark on the edge. Sure enough, the third time they sent us THE
SAME BOARD. Fortunately we had gotten a 947 for Y2K testing.
Unfortunately it kept dying with no SA message, just an amber light on
the box. They replaced about everything in that box. Finally we told
them to bring ANY box in and they did - a 917 with 20 users. Ever try to
triage a 917 with a 20-user limit when you're used to 200 on a 958?

The comment for this thread is that they brought in a 917 board that had
been changed to 100 users by a "magic" program. Our VP of Operations saw
that and said GET THAT THING OUTTA HERE! (Former Arthur Anderson type -
rigorously legal even to the point of pain).

We finally got up and running after 3 weeks of dead time.

The positive side is that that was the two-by-four between the eyes for
management to take Y2K seriously. We told them that they just saw Y2K -
only it won't come back.