From: pgut1@cs.aukuni.ac.nz (Peter Gutmann)
Newsgroups: comp.os.msdos.programmer
Subject: Borland NZ complaints (longish)
Date: 15 Sep 92 06:42:08 GMT
Organization: Computer Science Dept. University of Auckland

Posted for a Usenet-challenged friend....
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Am I a whinger or what?

When Borland (NZ) released the BC3.1 upgrade I trotted along tuit-suite as fast
as my little legs would carry me only to find out that they'd sold all the 3.5"
copies and I'd have to make do with a 5.25" one.  No problem... my machine's
got two drives so I could install it off B:.

Software was installed ... no worries.  Bit short on disk space here so I just
installed what I needed, not the whole 50MB or so.

Today I needed to install the said BC3.1 onto a PS/2 which only has a 3.5"
drive (before you complain "copyright".. this is a machine that I use on-site
so according to Borland's copyright I'm entitled to have a copy on two machines
providing only one is in use at any time.. I can't be in two places at once
<grin>).

Anyway.. I digress

I spent about an hour copying the 18 5.25" disks onto the same number of 3.5"
disks (formatting then using XCOPY).  Off I went to the site in town and
commenced to install BC3.1 using my 3.5" disks.

All went well until suddenly the install program came up with an error
complaining that it couldn't find WINLIB.ZIP.  ... guess what?

WINLIB.ZIP (or maybe it was another file, I forget) was on a disk that the
install program hadn't even asked for yet.  In fact it had stopped asking for
disks at number 16 of the set of 18.  Strange me thinks!

Looks as if Borland's install program is too smart for its own good.. it
"knows" that if you're installing off 3.5" HD media then you only need 16 disks
so the other 2 in my set were completely ignored.

I rang Borland.....

Borland> "Yep that's right, you can't just copy from 5.25 onto 3.5, it"
Borland> "won't install properly"

"I know that... can I get a 3.5" media set from you?

Borland> "Nope.. not for at least 2 months"

"What?  why the delay?"

Borland> "We're not shipping them until all the orders for the upgrade"
Borland> "have been filled first"

"Well what do I do then <situation explained>"

Borland> "You'll just have to buy another upgrade for $100+

"But I already OWN an upgrade, I just want it on 3.5in disks!"

Borland> "Too bad"

"Maybe you could lend me a set of 3.5in disks that I could copy and return?"

Borland> "Sorry, I can't let the master disks leave the office"

"Well could *you* copy them for me?"

Borland> "Nope, sorry, I'm too busy"

"Thank you for your 'assistance', good bye"

<click>

What the hell is going on here!  Is the word "support" a foreign concept to
these people?  Sure BC3.1 is a *great* product but Borland NZ stink and with an
attitude like that I'm tempted to switch to Microsoft C/C++ excepting they're
no better.. after all it did take over a week just to get a price out of them
and then it was 2x the US list price.

I did solve the problem in the end by writing a program which concatenated the
Borland *.CA? files into a *.ZIP, then I manually unzipped the last little bit
and installed it by hand.

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Editorial notes:

 - He couldn't install it onto the 5.25" system and back it up onto 3.5" system
   since there wasn't enough room on the 5.25" one to hold it all.
 
 - The comment about switching to MSC should probably be taken lightly, since
   MS NZ's support is truly appalling.
 
 - And you think *you* had it bad..... :-).
Xref: sparky comp.os.msdos.programmer:9200 comp.os.msdos.misc:5115