Why am I returning this Micron Millenia GS 133 PIII 733 ??
Written: Feb 12 '00
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Quick support response only with the priority access, and good customer service when you finally reach them. Willing to replace or refund without too much hastle. Sturdy chassis.
Cons: Bugs were not worked out and they know about them before I purchased the unit. Slow bug fixes provided. Stingy 14 day money back begins when shipped. Possible 25% restock fee they do not tell you about.Hasty Sales Reps, Terrible phone menus, Very average t
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| dougmjones's Full Review: Micron Millenia Maximum Performance |
In December I purchased my first pre-built system online at Micron. I wanted the PIII 733/133 so I called sales 800 number listed on the web site. They basically sell computers with the same patience, care and relaxed manner as a hotdog stand in New York City. They rush you through the process like they have to go to the bathroom real bad and you are holding them up. Especially since I have a slow southern accent. Even when I talk fast, it sounds slow. I wanted to make sure I had exactly what I wanted. They did not seem to grasp what a special and critical, even religious moment this was for ME. My goodness, for a nerd this similar to sex. Eventually after 3 or 4 callbacks I had the order corrected with the correct memory, and other options, they were pretty clueless to be honest and could not answer any basic questions like Geforce DDR .vs. non-DDR, RDram vs SDram. I could not get them to properly email me the list and quote in writing and finally gave up. The website also confirms your order but does not give you an invoice which is pretty important if you are trying to fax your credit union a copy so you can get that 9% PC loan to pay for this new toy. I think asking the customer to go through the entire web process and fill out all your personal information and credit card just to see your shipping total then cancel the screen, is a bad way of doing things.
I received the system very quickly. It was due on Jan 8, 2000 but arrived early on Jan, 3rd. It was ordered around December 18th, 1999. I was happy with the "out of box" and the method's of packing. My first impression was this is one fat PC and looks very modern, curvy and very star trekky, perhaps too much to match my other equipment. Oh yeah, and a new shade of tan, AAAARG ! But it didn't have any 50's Cadillac fins sticking out so I kept it. Very sturdy chassis, super easy tool free operation. I whipped the side cover off and had the extra PCI cards in there in 2 minutes. I absolutely loved the metal bar style retainer for the PCI slots. It is operated by a finger twisted knob on the rear and NO SCREWS. This is much better than screws falling on the floor behind my desk and worse into the chassis. The CPU had big heatsink and not fans which is good in some ways. At least I dont have to open it up and check the CPU fans to see if it has gone bad. A clumsy blue plastic folding door panel keeps air flowing by the CPUS when you have the side cover open. I see places on the panel to mount extra cooling fans. The 2 heavy duty cooling fans on the rear pull the air through the system quite well. Although louder expected, this system was much more quiet than my homebuilt Pentium 200 with a SCSI disk. The NEC CD-ROm is only a 40X speed and not one the 48X or higher seen on other brands but is was multiread and very sturdy allowing me to abuse it a little as most folks do by closing the tray with a nudge everytime.
At first I thought this little flap down plastic cover over the drive bays were stupid but they actually stop some of the sound from coming out the front where the drive bay fillers are. It also makes a nice place on the inside of the fold down door to stick the Micron Support numbers and will even hold some papers. It does not block the main CD.
I like the 6 PCI slots although I could never populate more than 5 of them due to maxing out the IRQs and other resources. So I guess six is a waste in my case. I did not care for the curved top because my CDRW doesn't sit on top of the system very well. I also have to lean the chassis over a little before the side cover can me reinstalled which gets old. The entire chassis leans back and the front is higher than the back which might make it look slick but it also looks out of place on your desk and office. You also cant make the power reset switch do a simple reset. I guess I should just say this system doesn't have a reset button. It allows standby mode and power off/on. There are also no fault LEDs as on the DELL that alarm you of fan or other hardware failures or POST (Power on Self Test) failures.
The docs, drivers and examples on the web site are very generic, and not really up to date in some areas, so if you think you are going to see a picture of your particular motherboard in the owners guide or the website you are sadly mistaken.
Another interesting problem that brings me back to my field engineer days. Make sure and pull the AC power cable out on the rear of the chassis when servicing and installing PCI slots. I'll tell you I almost had heart failure, I was installing a 3com 3c905C NIC card into slot 4 of the PCI bus and the whole CPU started powering up as I pushed the contacts into the slot. Wow ! Is this suppose to happen ? I have never seen a PC do this and to make it worse I forgot and did it again when installing a video capture card later. This is definetely a bug with this motherboard. I don;t have the energy to try and explain that to Micron.
Next I booted Windows98 SE for the first time. I opened IE and got through the wizard with little trouble but before even getting the computer setup for internet access the screen was already locking up or freezing while doing normal desktop activity with My Computer, Explorer and IE. I also had a second problem that really had this computer acting like a true out of the box case of lemons when my monitor went into standby with an amber and would not wake up. The only way to recover was to cycle the power on the NEC monitor. I then systematically disabled power management under windows, under the BIOS and on the monitor OSD. This fixed the problems with the monitor but the hang, freeze and windows VXD blue screens continued during operation.
Micron responded well when I called them but it was like a young fireman running to a fire with a water truck but no hose. They were baffled and had me reinstall my video drivers and then even rebuilt 98 several times. I finally installed the latest NVIDIA Geforce 256 generic drivers from www.nvidia.com and that helped a very little bit. I continued to battle this issue with Micron. It appears they have a BIOS fix for the power management problems and they are still working with NVIDIA for a dispaly driver that is decent. I also learned that some folks at Micron know about this problem and others do not. This leads to some interesting runaround you recieve. They could not come up with a good solution. It is Feb 12th and I am still broken and have requested a return and refund on the product. Beware to that their official stance is 14 days return after it ships from their factory not 14 days from the day you recieve according to their Tech Support Mgr.
The only other problems I had was with the Aureal Vortex 2 sound card. I didn't want this card anyway but they provided a poor selection. I wanted the Sound Blaster Live at first. I took the Aureal because of the A3d sound hype but it doesn't mean much if you aren't playing A3d enabled video games with flat panel 3D speakers. The card is excellent and the Monsoon flat panel speakers were incredible and a great value since I selected no speakers and ordered them over the internet for half the price. The problems came when recording with the Aurel, you have to single select just one of the input lines at a time when recording. Not that you really want to record multiple sources at the same time as much as you have to dabble in the darn mixer everytime you want to do something different. You also have to enable the equalizer and select which source uses the EQ each time. Man what a pain in the rumpus and Aureal can only say "We will improve this is future design and aware of it". Well where was this information when I bought it !
I also had some issues with performance. The disk was bench marking more similar to an ATA33 disk than an ATA66 disk. Tech support had no tools to test. They refused to go try the same program on one of theirs. They asked me to call sales. Sales was clueless. I could not even get tech support to confirm that the board does indeed operate at ATA66 disk speeds and is not a board with a bug or a limitation.
This gets better, trust me. I then as usual figured if it was going to get fixed soon I would have to do it. I then downloaded Windows Millenium Beta the replacement for WIN98 and installed it. It recognized all of the hardware including the Aureal sound card and the Geforce 256 display adapter. I then upgraded with the latest NVIDIA 3.68 video drivers and the latest Aureal Vortex 2 sound drivers. Except for one problem with Outlook 2000 and tunnel servers I was able to build a very stable system. This system ran for 2 weeks while I worked 12-14 hour days on it, web, telnet, email, office, web design and all of the other things I do daily. I was pleasantly pleased with this beta OS. 100% more solid than WIN98 and with some cool new features. I love the mount request for the floppy and CD-rom, just like a mainframe.
Next I downloaded the latest WIN 2000 Professional release which they state is the final GOLD released to manufacturer build 2195. Except for some minor rough edges related to the video driver and DirectX it performed flawlessly. I am a very demanding telecommuter and I cannot loose my system whn in the middle of a call. I may have customers and several telnet and other types of sessions going around the US and in some cases global.
I am overall happy with Micron but they just barely failed to meet the mark so I ordered a new Dell Dimmension XPS-B. I am worried the RDRAM may be a hog.
The bad thing is that Micron and Dell don;t realize how many friends, coworkers and family that people like us influence. The only reason we don't build our own is for convenience. If we have to debug their computer for them why shouldn't we just go ahead and build our own ?
Good Luck Micron and I'll try another one day when you win Editors Choice again and it's a real sure shot. I can't even believe ZDNET and other chuckle heads didn't mention this stuff in their god sent reviews during December. They must be kin to the engineers at my company. They also never find a bug. But as soon as I get one it starts bugging 10 minutes after I open it. That's because I actually USE a PC. I don't just play with them.
Are you listening DELL, MICRON, COMPAQ ? Make a fully integrated and fully tested WIN 2000 based PC with speed, fast 3d, fast 2d, and fully functional Digital Video capture and Multimedia. Give us a few calm relaxing games that aren't all like DOOM and QUAKE yet have the same performance. Give us fully completed bundle, not some half baked dream. We should have had this 5 years ago !
Happy Computing.
DJ2K
Recommended:
Yes
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Epinions.com ID:
dougmjones
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Location: Atlanta , Ga
Reviews written: 78
Trusted by: 24 members
About Me:
Computers, Music, Quality toys and gadgets. Like to review products that I demo or purchase.
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