From: sci240s@monu6.cc.monash.edu.au (Wey Jing HO)
Subject: Re: Borland NZ complaints (longish)
Organization: Monash University, Melb., Australia.
Date: Tue, 15 Sep 1992 10:04:01 GMT

In <1992Sep15.064208.25085@cs.aukuni.ac.nz> pgut1@cs.aukuni.ac.nz (Peter Gutmann) writes:

I usually solve this sort of problem by using a great little utility call
DISKDUPE available from normal SIMTEL-20 sites and its mirrors. You can dupe
5 1/4 disks with its 1.2MB format into a HD 3 1/2 as 1.2MB format. Great isn't
it?

>Posted for a Usenet-challenged friend....
>			    -----------------------
>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.

>				--------------------
>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..... :-).
-- 
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>Wey Jing Ho    Tel: 61-3-573-2567   E-mail : sci240s@monu6.cc.monash.edu.au<
>Physics Dept., Monash University ( Caulfield Campus ), Melbourne, AUSTRALIA<
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Newsgroups: comp.os.msdos.programmer