Boo Hiss   You may want to pass on it page.

This page is dedicated to the companies whom I have had personal experience with or I can personally verify the complaint. You may wish to take a pass on them or learn from my error. 

Westelcom.com,                          Posted March 4  2004

As many of the TavernBBS visitors have known, the Tavern has supported the local Telco that has in years past provided great service to us as well as our guests. As we moved on to the internet we moved as well to Westelcom.com DSL which is owned by the local Telco. Although the tech support was excellent the service provided by Westelcom.com was extremely costly and very slow. After a few months of trying to work things out with them so that we could continue to run the Tavern from Chazy I found they had NO interest in working with us. I can only conclude it is because we are not a big business and they have no interest in residential. They have not placed a finger on the touch pad to discuss the situation.  

Here is the bottom line. We were paying close to $80. / mo. for 512 K down and 120K up. with constant monitoring we received less than 300 K down and never more than 90 up. When were we getting slammed by other sites and could not even have the TavernBBS on line they could do nothing but collect the $80. 

My recommendation to all the old Tavern users as well as anyone else is to consider the switch to Cable.  Your Cable internet provides you with e-mail (Although you still can use the tavern Email if you wish as always) you will get and actual up speed of over 300K and a download speed of about 2.5 Meg ( This is my avg. and is about 10 times what I got from DSL). I have been on for only a few weeks but have not had any downtime. I think it's great all this for less than $50 bucks and they supply the Modem (This is unlike the $125. modem westelcom sold me for $400.)

Good computing----     Sean-

Dazzle - Pinnacle Systems,            11 September 2003

Recently Dazzle was purchased or taken over by Pinnacle Systems. At the end of September there will be no support for the Dazzle products. (I have the Dazzle DVD creation Station). My History I paid several hundred $$ on the purchase of the Creation station in order to convert old home video tapes to DVD and play them on the DVD player.  Dazzle was never able to support this but was working on it. 

Pinnacle Systems has offered the Dazzle customers a break so they can continue support. The Deal is (In my case) " Movie Box USB upgrade for $179.99 (Normally the price from them is $199. This offer ends the end of September 2003. Why the BOO? Well in this day and age a $20 discount under the circumstances is not very much but that's not the reason. I went to check the price on the web and found Tiger Direct offers the Movie Box USB kit for less than this at 5 different places on price watch the least of which was Harmony Computer for $157.99.

Now why would Pinnacle charge more to upgrade? I can't tell you but I am not going to bite and I hope you don't.

John