Never liked them. (Tiny Computers)

Member Name: slackjack

Product:	Tiny Computers
Date:	04/07/00 (300 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Cheap.

Disadvantages: Unreliable, poorly built.

I owned a Tiny PC a few years ago. It was a 486 DX2/66, and that was a pretty reasonable spec at the time. The price was good - one of the reasons I bought it, and the reason that Tiny sell so many PC's now, but of course, you get what you pay for. The machine had niggling faults from the start. The hard drive would power down while you were playing games. When we phone Tiny, they knew all about it and sent us a software fix - why it wasn't sent with the PC I'll never know. The first real problem we had was when we wanted to upgrade the memory. The machine was sold as being totally upgradeable, but upon opening it, we found that all the memory slots were full. Tiny didn't care about this - they still claimed that the PC was upgradeable - you just had to throw away all your memory to do it - this was when memory cost around £100 for 4 megabytes. Things went fairly smoothly until the warranty ran out. Then the machine started to die component by component. First the hard disk drive, then the floppy disk drive, the IDE/serial controller. By this time of course, the machine was no longer in use very much, and started to be broken up and the remaining bit incorporated into other systems. The keyboard was flimsy and eventually broke, the motherboard died, and the power supply gave up the fight too. The monitor still works, but now only in very low resolutions, and I think the only other remaining component still working is the graphics card.

I was as you can imagine sceptical when my place of work ordered a big batch of new Tiny machines. It's about 5 or 6 years since I got mine, so I thought there was a chance they might have got better. They haven't. In the year that we have had the machines, approximately half have gone down with serious problems - about half of these with hard drive failure, and the other half with a motherboard fault that stops them powering on at all. Several of the motherboards have developed BIOS faults, an
d they all suffer from an amusing bug in BIOS, which could lock you out of your computer altogether if you weren't careful. A couple of machines came from the factory with the memory and CPU not properly inserted, s had to be opened up before they would work. And if you do have to go inside the case, you find cable glued onto the motherboard (with a glue that slowly expands until the connection is broken, and you have to pick all the dried glue off to put the cable back) and cabling stretched across the case in some most annoying places.

They may be cheap, but it's got to be worth spending a few extra quid on a PC that's reliable.

Summary: