[TriLUG] Intrex and Linux Users

[Chris Hedemark]

On Fri, 2002-02-22 at 02:58, al johson wrote:
> Recently it has come to my knowledge that Intrex Computer Company (which we
> have discussed before and which has stores in Raleigh and Cary) WILL
> "ALLEGEDLY" NOW BUILD AND INSTALL LINUX BOXES FOR INDIVIDUAL USERS AND SMALL
> BUSINESS USERS!! In the past they have only had WINDOZE technicians but I've
> been told by a friend who has a company that makes purchases from them that
> they now have acquired Linux technicians who can now create AND service
> individual Linux boxes. In fact when they recently encountered a problem
> with one of their Linux boxes Intrex repaired it.

I've had mixed experiences with Intrex.  When I worked at BOPS, we were
buying systems from their Chapel Hill store.  While all of their
components were Linux-friendly, there were some staff shortcomings as
you might imagine.  I also had some other problems as well.

When I contacted their higher management about Linux support, I got a
very direct & promising response that 99% of the stuff they sold was
Linux-friendly.  This was definitely something that they had in mind
when they were deciding what hardware to keep in stock.

Most of the problems that I had were with their turnaround time on
systems, and with the lack of professional courtesy by their staff. 
Ultimately they lost out to another vendor on construction of custom
systems because of these two problems.  Turnaround time to build a
system was often three weeks to a month.  By the time I took delivery of
the system the price of all of the components had gone down a lot but
the price of the overall system didn't change.  Often I had problems
getting them to return calls or emails, and they didn't keep very good
records of our preferred configurations so I'd have to go and spec
everything out all over again the next time we ordered (even big boys
like Micron gave us the courtesy of keeping preferred configurations on
file).

The other problem that I had was with reliability. I think we had
purchased 8 or 9 systems from them from this one configuration type, and
like 3 or 4 of them died (hardware problems).  As best as I can figure
they were probably using cheap power supplies which is a big no-no with
AMD systems.

I still buy individual components there from time to time but not
complete systems.  I don't know that their techs have the expertise to
spec out hardware that works well together.

On the flip side, I've gotten some VERY custom systems from Stay
Online.  Have you ever needed a system with 18 PCI slots?  I did.  And
they delivered.  They were AWESOME at working with me through some tough
hardware conflict issues and did a great job of delivering a system that
met or exceeded our specifications (which were very tough specs mind
you).  The price on those 18-slot systems were a lot less than I had
anticipated, BTW.  And they worked fine with Red Hat 7.1.

-- 
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| Rev. Chris Hedemark, DD
| Hillsborough, NC
| http://yonderway.com
| GPG Public Key - http://yonderway.com/chris/hedemark.gpg
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