From: j2yc@jupiter.sun.csd.unb.ca (EvilEd)
Subject: A growing dislike for Amiga
Summary: They may get long, I'm in a bad mood 
Organization: University of New Brunswick
Date: Sat, 3 Oct 1992 21:37:49 GMT

About a year ago, I encouraged my girl friend (who was entering her 
third year of a History degree) to purchase an Amiga to do simple tasks
like word processing, and for me a bit of telecommuting.  I have
never regretted a decision more than this.. let me tell you why...

Friends of mine in the Amiga world were forever praising the Amiga.
And I had an old XT clone which I felt perfectly adequate to do
any type of tasks which I needed done.  But after I introduced my YL
to the world of GUI word processing, she wanted something nice and 
simple to use... point click drag and shoot instead of the traditional
CTRL-SHIFT-F7, etc.  Well good enough.  It was either to go with the
Mac or the Amiga...

I convinced her to spend the extra money to get an amiga (About $3000 
for the 2000HD with the 1084s, a modem, and a printer.. actually maybe
a bit more...)  I wanted it to play around with after hearing such
nice things about it from friends...

What a load of crap.  Every day I think I hate this machine more and more.
Staring at a word processor, you'd swear that you were looking at CGA
text.  Sure they say the amiga has 4096 dazzling colours.. what they don't
say is that the resolution of plain and simple text is garbage to look
at for any length of time other than to type LEMMINGS on the CLI screen.
Simple word processing is not worth the $200 or so we forked over for
a lousy program (PenPal I believe.. we have since moved to Excellence!
but I'll talk about that later...)  I wanted to get access to this
hoard of software that was assumed to exist somewhere...  Right.  
I can tell you right now why major software developers aren't going for
this machine -- since businesses are large purchasers of equipment,
they are not going to buy a machine if something as simple as Wordprocessing
is hard on the eyes.  Scrolling down the screen is even worse...

Excellence is yet another story.. We bought penpal from a dealer in
saint john who we asked "does this have footnotes.. this is very
important"   "Oh yeah, he said.. of course.. this is a good program."
After paying $200+ for it... Sorry.. maybe no footnotes afterall.

And thanks to the writers of penpal for their wonderful customer support.
Not a PEEP after we sent in our card.  No  "extras" disk that we
promised...  Anyways...

Excellence does footnotes but don't seem to want to configure them..
and a new twist, the capital A key and the k key no longer produce
the letters normally assigned... Kiss another few hundred bucks 
goodbye...

What do I do?  I am a student in engineering so I go looking for
some good graphing programs, a spreadsheet, think I found anything?
Nope.  Except of course lots of pretty games.  What a nice game 
computer, Commodore.  

Yes, these are simple reasons but simple reasons are why people buy
computers.  Businesses use them for simple tasks like printing out
customer address labels, correspondence, even keeping financial 
records..   Graphic artists, who are probably the only ones who even
care about the such great multiitude of colours and graphics
'capabilities' can probably complain about the slowness of the machine.

If anyone wants to buy an Amiga.. please let me know.  I doubt we can
even *hope* of getting anything remotely of value for it.  Maybe
I will trade it for a fishtank.


To Commodore:  The VIC and the C=64 were wonderful machines.  Great for
introducing us all to the joys of what computers can do.  Amigas are a
waste of time.  I can see the reasoning for the high support of the
IBM line and clones.   I am not impressed at all with my Amiga.  I regret
even wishing to support Commodore.  In the future, I do not plan to
even consider commodore as an alternative and I intend to impress upon 
any peer wishing to purchase an entry level machine.

Since I do not read this newsgroup due to its volume, any responses can
be mailed to me directly at j2yc@jupiter.sun.csd.unb.ca

Derek Billingsley
Poor student helping to pay off a big computer lease.



Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.advocacy