Sales ethics for Vista

It has been my experience that retailers like Incredible Connection, Makro and Game just want to make a sale. Their sales staff have little, if any, training on the products they sell. Some don't even know the difference between an RJ11 and an RJ45! :mad: They will say anything to make a sale! :(

:rolleyes:

The hidden costs of Vista are horrendous. Nobody seems to realise a lot of peripherals are not going to work with Vista and will need replacing. I did a quick test in my workshop. I installed Vista Business on my admin computer. My HP 1010 won't work, my camera doesn't play nicely with it and scanner doesn't work either. Of my 3 USB flash drives only one will work with Vista. Oh, and my bookkeeping software threw random BSODs. :eek: With 1GB of RAM it was like trying to run through waist-deep water. I returned to XP within an hour!

Interesting - so ppl doesn't get told about the "hidden costs" conveniently, and so have to purchase newer stuff which'll work with Vista...

Bah, if I need to buy a new PC, I'll be playing hardball with the salesdroid. No vista, and a discount because it's got no vista on it. :D
 
:rolleyes:



Interesting - so ppl doesn't get told about the "hidden costs" conveniently, and so have to purchase newer stuff which'll work with Vista...

Bah, if I need to buy a new PC, I'll be playing hardball with the salesdroid. No vista, and a discount because it's got no vista on it. :D

XP will be withdrawn from the market at the end of June according to 2 of the distributors with whom I deal regularly. So remember to get it while you can. I see I am down to only 2 notebooks with XP now and both are conveniently "out of stock"!

The hidden costs are being ignored by everybody including Microsoft. When confronted at a Microsoft gathering in PE last year they denied that any products didn't work with Vista. When I insisted and quoted my personal experience (without saying it was my own equipment) they trashed the "customer's" equipment as being obsolete and needing replacement anyway. Picture their faces when I owned up to it being my own equipment and nothing being older than 18 months! :D Then they backpedalled like mad and blamed the manufacturers for not writing drivers...

Quite frankly I don't care who is actually to blame for the f$ckup with compatibility but it needs to be fixed. This is Africa NOT Europe or America where we can just write off computers every year and replace them. When I sell a pc it is expected to last a minimum of five years in a business environment and more than that in a home environment. Now while I realise this is probably not the norm all over South Africa I live in the Eastern Cape, arguably the poorest province in the country, there just is no money here for replacing computers before they are really really old!
 
XP will be withdrawn from the market at the end of June according to 2 of the distributors with whom I deal regularly. So remember to get it while you can. I see I am down to only 2 notebooks with XP now and both are conveniently "out of stock"!

I mostly deal with Axiz, and most of the Vista loaded machines are "downgradeable". And in my experiance, if you get it from the Disti with Vista and THEN downgrade to XP, you will run into endless driver issues. Best to let them do it, and if something is faulty, they can fix it.

The hidden costs are being ignored by everybody including Microsoft. When confronted at a Microsoft gathering in PE last year they denied that any products didn't work with Vista. When I insisted and quoted my personal experience (without saying it was my own equipment) they trashed the "customer's" equipment as being obsolete and needing replacement anyway. Picture their faces when I owned up to it being my own equipment and nothing being older than 18 months! :D Then they backpedalled like mad and blamed the manufacturers for not writing drivers...

Being a sales person myself, but to corporates and not consumers, I feel the IT staff should test some machines from the vendor to see if the new desktops/notebooks would work with all the Apps they have running in their enviroment.
 
Being a sales person myself, but to corporates and not consumers, I feel the IT staff should test some machines from the vendor to see if the new desktops/notebooks would work with all the Apps they have running in their enviroment.

I doubt that most people buying from IC, Game, Makro etc have their own IT staff.
 
I doubt that most people buying from IC, Game, Makro etc have their own IT staff.

I was reffering to corporates. IC is pure evil in any thing they sell, they would sell their own mothers for profit.:sick:
 
The hidden costs are being ignored by everybody including Microsoft. When confronted at a Microsoft gathering in PE last year they denied that any products didn't work with Vista. When I insisted and quoted my personal experience (without saying it was my own equipment) they trashed the "customer's" equipment as being obsolete and needing replacement anyway. Picture their faces when I owned up to it being my own equipment and nothing being older than 18 months! :D Then they backpedalled like mad and blamed the manufacturers for not writing drivers...

Very well done :D

I think XP piracy will skyrocket after the cut-off date...

...whoa, feeling of deja-vu... OS/2 had the same issue, you had to be careful which hardware you buy, not all hardware had OS/2 drivers...

If Vista follows the same path as OS/2, it'll die out soon :D

Thank goodness we've got the various Linux distros (and XP as well) :D
 
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this is slowly turning into an os thread :o Anyway, sales people should be knowledgeable and should offer the best advice they can, if that means admitting they have no clue, then that's exactly what they should do. However since we don't live in that world the consumer should ask someone else who has nothing to gain from giving them any advice, while it won't guarantee a good purchase, chances are whomever you ask won't say go with the Celery and 256MiB.

One other things to keep in mind is that nobody who has XP is obligated to upgrade to Vista, if your peripherals work fine on a 7 years old operating system that is mature, then stay with XP there's lots of support for it and virtually every driver under the sun for every device.

Don't upgrade to Vista and expect your Peach Printer to work from the early 90s chances are it won't and never will. A sad situation but one that's a reality. I would have wanted to use my old Pro Audio Spectrum 16 sound card in WindowsXP but there were no drivers and I had to let it go... If it's that important to use the sound card, then I should stay with Windows'98se and not get so irritated that there are no drivers for XP, that's hardly the operating system's fault :(
 
I only sell celerons if they are going to run linux or are going into an iCafe and all that is done on them is web browsing otherwise I sell dual cores. If my prospective client insists on a celeron I advise them to buy somewhere else, I will not give them a celeron for home or office use and have complaints 3 months down the line about how slow the machine I sold them is. With desktops its a R300 price difference at most on laptops its around R1000.

I don't want clients constantly calling me about machine speed.
 
I don't understand though. Why would the system only slow down 3months later if it's only down to CPU choice? Even a Core2 Etxreme should slow down then after 3 months :/
 
Don't upgrade to Vista and expect your Peach Printer to work from the early 90s chances are it won't and never will. A sad situation but one that's a reality. I would have wanted to use my old Pro Audio Spectrum 16 sound card in WindowsXP but there were no drivers and I had to let it go... If it's that important to use the sound card, then I should stay with Windows'98se and not get so irritated that there are no drivers for XP, that's hardly the operating system's fault :(

My point was that none of my devices were older than 18 months! I feel expecting me to replace my peripherals which are less than 2 years old is over the top! :eek:

Personally, I will hang on to XP as long as I can but any new systems which I build and sell will, from June, have to have Vista. Downgrading can be problematic as several techies here have experienced. Depending on the hardware, it is not impossible but it is getting more difficult with each passing month.
 
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