Customer service, or lack thereof...

[ChadV]

The major reason why it isn't in more homes is because distribution for a product like that is difficult to come by, and direct orders were slow at best.

You haven't been forgotten about, I've been pestering twice a week about it to see where the status is, and should have been more vocal about that.

[o13102]

As a follow up, what I did was:

I spent about a week trying to locate the Asus M3A78-EM & M3N78-VM you folks use, and other than used boards pulled from systems out of China, I couldn't find any that you could buy... I decided that was too risky so I went off in my own direction. I understand your supply chain pain, I'm surprised you can source any of those boards at this point.

I wound up ordering an Asus M4N78 Pro (full size ATX board) and a larger HTPC case (to fit the board) off of the web and reused the processor, RAM, SATA HDD's and wireless keyboard from my Link. I wiped the drive and installed a clean copy of Ubuntu 10.10 , enabled the Nvida drivers for the embedded GeForce 8300. It took about 10 minutes to get SPDIF and the video setup, and another 10 minutes installing XBMC. Added my data drives after the install and let XBMC index them into the library. All in all, I've probably got 3 hours into it and I'm back in business.

PS - Sorry to part ways like this, but I needed a solution, and doing it myself got me up and running in less than a handful of hours.

PPS - this runs circles around my old 1st gen ATI based Link.

[ChadV]

Actually, the lack of availability of the M3A78-EM is the major reason why the ATi version was discontinued.  And then the lack of availability of the M3N78-VM is why we discontinued the nVidia and move to the Intel model.

You're right, the nVidia cards do run circles around the ATi cards under Linux, hence why we switched.  And at the time we went to the Intel, it was because nVidia was no longer supporting HDMI out on their integrated chipsets.

[o13102]

Actually, the lack of availability of the M3A78-EM is the major reason why the ATi version was discontinued.  And then the lack of availability of the M3N78-VM is why we discontinued the nVidia and move to the Intel model.

You're right, the nVidia cards do run circles around the ATi cards under Linux, hence why we switched.  And at the time we went to the Intel, it was because nVidia was no longer supporting HDMI out on their integrated chipsets.

Yea, I understand the supply chain challenges you're having. This may be the "Achilles heel" of trying to to use consumer grade PC parts as a  basis for the system. PC hardware evolves so insanely fast these days, it certainly outpaces software development on a project like this exponentially.

I hope you get it worked out.

[stvictor]

Update:
One more month gone by and still no link.  The only response or information that I have received is what you see in the forum and I think that is absolutely unacceptable.   I have tried to be patient but i will have to say that this customer service team is the worst one that I have had to deal with yet!