Aiwa Bolt (same shit different pile!!)

[donald henschel <don.henschel@sk.sympatico.ca>]

I just found your web page and was relieved to find out that I`m not the
only sucker out here. I purchased an Aiwa Bolt 10GB tape drive back in
December, a few days before Christmas. I was lured into buying this junk
by the low price of $100.00 for a 10 GB unit. Proprietary tapes should
have scared me off, but instead I bought one.This proves that "the poor
and stingy pay twice"! I was not able to find out what kind of a peice
of shit this thing was because I did not have any tapes. After many
frustrating calls to Aiwa (many of which gave me busy signals or
unanswered voice mail or just shuffled off to another department).
Finally, one very hard to find Aiwa web site (with a bulletin about the
Aiwa Bolt), informed me that this was the same shit but a different pile
as the Sony SuckerStation. They also mentioned that the tapes were fully
compatible with the bolt from hell. It took many more phone calls and
inquiries to find a supplier for these tapes (special order of which was
no surprise ). After a long wait and $55.00 I tried out this lemon. It
backed up about 14 megs and puked. It displayed a media error. After a
second atempt it backed up 9 megs and then indicated that the tape was
not formated (the package indicated pre-formated). If all of this BS
was`nt  enough, I had to go through the many hours of waiting to
reformat this tape which started out with much time wasted waiting for
it to go through its "shoe shine" process. Eight hours later (in the
middle of the night) the formating process puked and displayed a media
error. Wasting more money on another tape and cleaning the
head(recomended every 8hrs) did not solve this problem. How do you clean
the head every 8 hours when it takes over 12 hours to reformat the
tape?! Tech support sucks the big one and after waiting hours being put
on hold, I received no help from Sony or Aiwa. I just received busy
signals, voice mail (which was never answered or returned) and was
shuffled off to other departments and put on hold and received voice
mail recordings. Some of these departments did`nt even know what a tape
backup unit was. The stupid ass holes thought it was audio equipment.
I should mention that I am running this junk on a Pentium III 450 with
win 98 SE so I can not see any reason why it should not work other than
the fact it was never intended to work.

                                                          Thanks for the
web site of which I found using a search engine.

                                                          Another
disgusted Sony-Aiwa customer
                                                          Don Henschel