Pet peave - poorly written manuals (especially mb manuals)

[dkistner]

This is just a random rant...

I get really frustrated by some of the manufacturers that include
manuals that are skimpy and obviously written by a person that doesn't
speak English very well at all. People are often saying "read the
manual" before you post questions on a newsgroup, but sometimes there
isn't much of a manual to read.

I recently bought a motherboard that seemed like a "bargain" from
Newegg. It was a brand of board I'd never used before (I've used about
all of the major brands over the years except for this one.

Newegg, as always, was great, but I had problems with the installation
of the board and the manual was pretty darned useless.

I thought, no problem, I'll go to their web site for info. Sometimes
in the past I've run into this problem with a skimpy manual, and simply
visited the manufacturers web site to get a more detailed version of
the manual.

No luck.

The web site was just as useless as the original manual. Also, no
technical support phone number (none). There was an email address for
support. I sent a detailed email for help (including everything that
I'd encountered and what I tried up to this point) but I didn't hear
back for quite some time (I felt like my email was in some "black hole"
and I'd never hear anything back. I eventually figured out the problem
on my own, and then technical support FINALLY sent an answering email.
You guessed it, a person that didn't know squat about anything (geesh,
what a waste). I'm sure all of us have had this experience. Sometimes
it's some person who knows a very LITTLE BIT of pigeon-English and
that's "it".

I could better communicate with a rock on the ground.

Anyway, I was reflecting on the experience today and noted that I'd
saved a whole whopping $4 on this "bargain board". For $4 I could have
gone with a good brand. And I've since had to buy another board and
went back to Abit. I opened up the mb box and found a beautifully
detailed manual. I visited their website to look for bios info and
felt like I'd entered paradise .......they actually had a decent
web site for folks. There are other mb manufacturers that have similar
manuals & support. I wonder why any of us EVER buy a board from these
fly-by-night guys? I won't ever again

Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh. There, I got it off my chest

 

[SteveH]

This is just a random rant...

I get really frustrated by some of the manufacturers that include
manuals that are skimpy and obviously written by a person that doesn't
speak English very well at all. People are often saying "read the
manual" before you post questions on a newsgroup, but sometimes there
isn't much of a manual to read.

I recently bought a motherboard that seemed like a "bargain" from
Newegg. It was a brand of board I'd never used before (I've used about
all of the major brands over the years except for this one.

Newegg, as always, was great, but I had problems with the installation
of the board and the manual was pretty darned useless.

I thought, no problem, I'll go to their web site for info. Sometimes
in the past I've run into this problem with a skimpy manual, and simply
visited the manufacturers web site to get a more detailed version of
the manual.

No luck.

The web site was just as useless as the original manual. Also, no
technical support phone number (none). There was an email address for
support. I sent a detailed email for help (including everything that
I'd encountered and what I tried up to this point) but I didn't hear
back for quite some time (I felt like my email was in some "black hole"
and I'd never hear anything back. I eventually figured out the problem
on my own, and then technical support FINALLY sent an answering email.
You guessed it, a person that didn't know squat about anything (geesh,
what a waste). I'm sure all of us have had this experience. Sometimes
it's some person who knows a very LITTLE BIT of pigeon-English and
that's "it".

I could better communicate with a rock on the ground.

Anyway, I was reflecting on the experience today and noted that I'd
saved a whole whopping $4 on this "bargain board". For $4 I could have
gone with a good brand. And I've since had to buy another board and
went back to Abit. I opened up the mb box and found a beautifully
detailed manual. I visited their website to look for bios info and
felt like I'd entered paradise .......they actually had a decent
web site for folks. There are other mb manufacturers that have similar
manuals & support. I wonder why any of us EVER buy a board from these
fly-by-night guys? I won't ever again

Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh. There, I got it off my chest

My pet peave is people that can't spell peeve. ;-)

 

[JAD]

My pet peave is people that can't spell peeve. ;-)

My pet peeve are people who have Pet peeves and don't walk them on the
leash!

 

[Jon Danniken]

This is just a random rant...

I get really frustrated by some of the manufacturers that include
manuals that are skimpy and obviously written by a person that doesn't
speak English very well at all. People are often saying "read the
manual" before you post questions on a newsgroup, but sometimes there
isn't much of a manual to read.

I recently bought a motherboard that seemed like a "bargain" from
Newegg. It was a brand of board I'd never used before (I've used about
all of the major brands over the years except for this one.

Newegg, as always, was great, but I had problems with the installation
of the board and the manual was pretty darned useless.

I thought, no problem, I'll go to their web site for info. Sometimes
in the past I've run into this problem with a skimpy manual, and simply
visited the manufacturers web site to get a more detailed version of
the manual.

No luck.

The web site was just as useless as the original manual. Also, no
technical support phone number (none). There was an email address for
support. I sent a detailed email for help (including everything that
I'd encountered and what I tried up to this point) but I didn't hear
back for quite some time (I felt like my email was in some "black hole"
and I'd never hear anything back. I eventually figured out the problem
on my own, and then technical support FINALLY sent an answering email.
You guessed it, a person that didn't know squat about anything (geesh,
what a waste). I'm sure all of us have had this experience. Sometimes
it's some person who knows a very LITTLE BIT of pigeon-English and
that's "it".

I could better communicate with a rock on the ground.

It is very not pleasing to have an understanding of unable for information
find out when very casually reading You may dixcover truth hidden inside.

Jon

 

[J]

This is just a random rant...

I get really frustrated by some of the manufacturers that include
manuals that are skimpy and obviously written by a person that doesn't
speak English very well at all. People are often saying "read the
manual" before you post questions on a newsgroup, but sometimes there
isn't much of a manual to read.

I recently bought a motherboard that seemed like a "bargain" from
Newegg. It was a brand of board I'd never used before (I've used about
all of the major brands over the years except for this one.

Newegg, as always, was great, but I had problems with the installation
of the board and the manual was pretty darned useless.

I thought, no problem, I'll go to their web site for info. Sometimes
in the past I've run into this problem with a skimpy manual, and simply
visited the manufacturers web site to get a more detailed version of
the manual.

No luck.

The web site was just as useless as the original manual. Also, no
technical support phone number (none). There was an email address for
support. I sent a detailed email for help (including everything that
I'd encountered and what I tried up to this point) but I didn't hear
back for quite some time (I felt like my email was in some "black hole"
and I'd never hear anything back. I eventually figured out the problem
on my own, and then technical support FINALLY sent an answering email.
You guessed it, a person that didn't know squat about anything (geesh,
what a waste). I'm sure all of us have had this experience. Sometimes
it's some person who knows a very LITTLE BIT of pigeon-English and
that's "it".

I could better communicate with a rock on the ground.

Anyway, I was reflecting on the experience today and noted that I'd
saved a whole whopping $4 on this "bargain board". For $4 I could have
gone with a good brand. And I've since had to buy another board and
went back to Abit. I opened up the mb box and found a beautifully
detailed manual. I visited their website to look for bios info and
felt like I'd entered paradise .......they actually had a decent
web site for folks. There are other mb manufacturers that have similar
manuals & support. I wonder why any of us EVER buy a board from these
fly-by-night guys? I won't ever again

Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh. There, I got it off my chest

So which was this first mainboard you bought? Come on, this is usenet after
all.

I recently got an Asus MB (P5GD2). I don't know if its support was
relatively good or bad, since it's the first one I've ever bought. IMO tho,
it's not good. The manual, while acceptable, suffers from being the same
model MS still uses: it's just a reference manual that explains (usually not
too well) how to do various things, but not why or when, or even what the
hell they mean. "To enable BIOS Setting X, change it to 'Enabled'. Its
other value is Disabled". Wow, that's really useful. Morons.

Main problem is the website though. Slow, badly organized, files not well
described. I find that most support is fairly bad though. Companies just
don't care. At least no more than what they judge the bottom-line-affecting
level to be.

Usually a company's product FAQ consists of like 4 totally useless questions
that were partially answered back in '97. Thanks alot. Of course the FAQ
merely supplements what should be a thoro manual--very easy to do, but they
don't really care.

Package exteriors are full-color and glossy, but once the product is sold,
literature suddenly goes black & white, on plain paper with no pictures, in
broken english. Or nowadays, an equally badly thrown together pdf user
guide...made even worse by that clunky Adobe Reader which takes 40 minutes
to load, and also that it seems to take 38 pages to describe even the
simplest of functions--though 36 of those pages refer you to other sections
of the guide. There, I said it.

 

[djs0302]

This is just a random rant...

I get really frustrated by some of the manufacturers that include
manuals that are skimpy and obviously written by a person that doesn't
speak English very well at all. People are often saying "read the
manual" before you post questions on a newsgroup, but sometimes there
isn't much of a manual to read.

My pet peeve is when manufacturers put the manual only on a cd or on
their website. In other words, you have to already have a computer in
order to build a computer. If you only have one computer and it dies
completely how are you suppose to build a new one if all the manuals
require a computer to view them?

 

[David Maynard]

My pet peeve is when manufacturers put the manual only on a cd or on
their website. In other words, you have to already have a computer in
order to build a computer. If you only have one computer and it dies
completely how are you suppose to build a new one if all the manuals
require a computer to view them?

good point

 

[Tom Lake]

If you only have one computer and it dies

completely how are you suppose to build a new one if all the manuals
require a computer to view them?

Maybe they figure your first task after building the system will be to print
the
manuals yourself? At the speed of my printer, I figure a large manual would
only take four or five hours to print!

Tom Lake

 

[David Maynard]

Maybe they figure your first task after building the system will be to print
the
manuals yourself?

You mean after it's assembled you can print the assembly instructions?

 

[dkistner]

It was a Biostar motherboard. Actually they did me a favor (even
though it cost me days of headaches). I learned to pay a few dollars
more to get a brand that I'm comfortable with (in this case I could
have paid $4 more and had a better board, with a great instruction
manual, and decent support). I've had GREAT experiences with Abit over
the years. I've also had good experiences with Gigabyte, Asus, MSI and
ASRock. Yes, I've had problems from time-to-time with these brands,
but nothing like with the Biostar nightmare. I could have returned the
board to Newegg, but I thought I could make the board work (and I did)
and I didn't want to cause Newegg problems (it really wasn't their
fault)...

I'm sure the Biostar is a good board if you don't have problems. But
in my case I had problems and with the poor manual, support, and web
site, I was "on my own" trying to figure it all out.

To be honest, I've encounterd these kind of problems with other
hardware also (not just motherboards). But you can usually "figure
things out on your own" or Google for answers........but with a newer
model motherboard, if things go wrong, I REALLY need some help/answers
that may not be available elsewhere.

- David Kistner

 

[dkistner]

Yea, I am a very poor speller

 

[Sean Cousins]

My pet peeve is when manufacturers put the manual only on a cd or on
their website.

What company does that? I've never bought a mb that never came with a
HC manual and want to avoid any that doesn't come with one.

 

[PWY]

What company does that? I've never bought a mb that never came with a
HC manual and want to avoid any that doesn't come with one.

The Gigabyte 8IEXP I am using from 21/2 years ago didn't come with a manual.
I had to download it from their website. Took about a quarter ream of paper
to print but it was worth it.
I'm still waiting for their answer on a question I had for their "customer
support" team. Luckily I was able to garner enough information elsewhere to
solve the problem and the board has been great.

PWY

 

[dkistner]

It can't cost very much to mass-produce a modest (but accurate and
usable) manual. That's what amazes me.

I'll NEVER buy another Biostar mb as long as I live, after my bad
experience recently. I'll buy mb's from manufacturers who DO include a
decent manual (written in REAL English, not the pigeon-English that is
gibberish).

Again, it only cost me $4 more to get a comparable board that had all
the vital things that make an install a breeze. Hey, they (Abit) even
included a floppy for the SATA drivers (I'm one of those guys that
still installs a floppy drive......I didn't expect this but I sure
appreciated it....nice touch). Heck, from Biostar I couldn't even
download and print a good copy of the manual -- the downloadable manual
was the same cheezy junk I already had.

- David Kistner