First experience of ZooStorm not Brilliant

[gshaw]

Tbh i prefer hp broadcom stuff but Intel is a second. I WISH I had been able to send back a batch of Lenovos with junk nic's in them. That is one reason why I steer clear of them as they are built with whatever components are left on the bench that day so their driver lists for a single model are pages long and full of stuff your one may not even have. /rant

 

Yup avoid the Edge series Lenovos like the plague, would rather have a refurb M-Series from ICT Direct that's built with consistent parts than a brand new Edge machine with a lottery of internals

 

The E-Series laptops seemed OK though

[Duke5A]

Intels Nic hardware may be better but their drivers are terrible, half the time the cards aren't even recognize by their own drivers as they get the hardware ids mixed up. Their default setting of not waiting for the link to come up before reporting it is junky too.

 

 

 

Tbh i prefer hp broadcom stuff but Intel is a second. I WISH I had been able to send back a batch of Lenovos with junk nic's in them. That is one reason why I steer clear of them as they are built with whatever components are left on the bench that day so their driver lists for a single model are pages long and full of stuff your one may not even have. /rant

 

You too, huh? Some of Intel's marketing monkeys must have found their way into engineering - product names and device ID's are a mess. The drivers seem to be suffering too as I had an entire lab's worth of Optiplex 780 machines randomly drop link and rolling back drivers fixed it. I don't think I've ever had an issue with a Broadcom NIC. Realtek on the other hand isn't worth silicon that was used to fab the chip.

[gshaw]

One thing that does irritate me with Intel is the fact WoL is disabled by default on the driver install with no simple command line to enable it during setup. Changing it afterwards requires some housing with scripts that adds unnecessary work.

 

The connection itself is rock solid though. Realtek cards had constant problems with GPOs not applying, domain login issues etc.

[free780]

WOL was disabled by default on the h81m-k. I think its a security thing. You can push out a reg key to get WOL enabled windows wise

[PeterW]

Indeed, I sent a batch of Lenovos back because they shipped with a Realtek NIC instead of the usual Intel one. It's been the biggest worry I have about moving to MSI boards in the new Stone machines now Intel have stopped making motherboards. Realtek are OK for sound cards but their network drivers have been consistently poor. Wouldn't touch anything ASUS with a very long barge pole either...

 

A lot of the last gen entry Intel desktop boards used realtek network controllers anyways, I was under the impression Store were going to use Pegatron for their boards. MSI tend to have the best BIOS release notes if you have access to the detailed FAE notes which your system builder should have.

 

Had similar issue with Asus Board with Nvidia NIC - possible solution here:. Worked on my home PC anyway.

 

Yeah NVidia phy much fun, I think the problem with ASUS was they never seemed to want to update the NVidia oprom in the BIOS.

[hyb80]

Hey Guys

 

One of the Admin staff needed a new machine she's the equivalent of a Buisness Manager and her old Dell was close to 7 years old. The best and cheapest machine I could find was an i5 ZooStorm with Gigabit Ethernet, 8GB RAM and an 128GB SSD.

The components inside look decent, ASUS motherboard, Samsung RAM and Kingston SSD. Bit of a mix match but they're all good brands as far as I'm aware so it didn't bother me. Though after spending a day getting all the services setup and configuring the computer I took her old one away and gave her the new ZooStorm beast, I do have to say it booted and logged in under 5 seconds incredibly fast!

 

Now I'm having issues where the computer will just randomly drop connection (ethernet of course) for no reason and will loose the Mapped Drives etc... I can't see a reason so I updated the Ethernet Driver and made sure that the turn off to save power feature was unchecked in Device Manager but she's still having problems?

No other computer in the school has this issueI find it all really weird and can't get my head around it, I hope to god it's not a faulty machine, what do you guys all think?

 

Cheers!!

 

 

Other than adding a nic to this did you ever resolve the original problem ? Got a very similar problem only solution is to reboot

[synaesthesia]

I will do a side by side comparison of the Very and the Zoo's

 

Update, Zoostorms arrived. Gigabyte mainboard, Specteck ram, random power supply, Sandisk Pulse SSD.

I'll say it now - @CPLTD are *brave*.

[free780]

BIOS update seems to have fixed the freezing issue.

[rad]

I am faced with 120 of these things.... and an RM CC4 network they dont want to build onto.

ZooStorm sent me this email, and I quote:

Are you able to boot from the windows recovery disk and load into Windows? We do not support networking so if you can boot from this CD then it will indicate there is no fault with the unit itself.

 

Anyone out there got ZooStorm working on a CC4 network please get in touch.

[free780]

When you say not build onto. What do you mean?

[X-13]

When you say not build onto. What do you mean?

 

Imaging a machine onto an RM network is called "building" by RM.

 

It's applying the windows image, then installing the settings and RM stuff, then the rest of the software.

[rad]

To elaborate, to get a computer onto an RM network you network boot it to pick up the image files from the server.

The ZooStorm PC will PXE boot but fails on "partition disk" section imediately after entering computer name and Admin password.

[X-13]

To elaborate, to get a computer onto an RM network you network boot it to pick up the image files from the server.

The ZooStorm PC will PXE boot but fails on "partition disk" section imediately after entering computer name and Admin password.

 

I usually get that when the drivers are off.

 

RM PxE uses vista drivers.

[HTCPCP]

We have 3 different build disks which we use. One uses the Atheros AR8151 PCI-E Gigabit Ethernet Controller version 2.0.4.4, another has 2 different Realtek ones (Realtek PCI GBE Family Controller 6.249.621.2011 and 2 Realtek PCIe GBE family Controller version 5.790.824.2011).

 

Where about in the build do you get to before it falls over? Is it just not picking up the IP address?

[ZoostormSupport]

Good afternoon

 

Firstly I would like to offer you my sincere apologies for all inconvenience caused. At Zoostorm we take pride in ensuring our customer’s satisfaction and unfortunately we did not meet your expectations on this occasion. We deeply value your custom and are committed to providing you with the highest level of service simply because our customers deserve the very best.

Please could you email full details of the problem to [email protected] and we will investigate and respond without delay.

 

Regards

Service Operations Manager

www.zoostorm.com

[markcuk]

hello VIP!

[synaesthesia]

Ours aren't bad so far. Surprising how many loose motherboards there are though, for all future units (we've still got 30 odd to deploy) I suspect we'll be opening them up and tightening the screws to an acceptable standard. That's a lot of time added to each machine, and suspect this will be the last batch. Edited July 1, 2014 by synaesthesia

[abillybob]

@ZoostormSupport, maybe think about making yourself a Direct Supporter? I suppose at the end of it all it's nice to see a hardware vendor get involved and attempt to support those that are struggling on this site with the obvious exception of Apple!

[rad]

@ZoostormSupport thanks for the PM, I will reply. I would rather email to a more specific person that a general Support email though.

[Haptic]

I'll say it now - @CPLTD are *brave*.

 

We are indeed (braver than most, perhaps) We've worked with Zoostorm for over 4 years now, equipped hundreds of units to lots of different sites edu/business and otherwise.

 

Although I'm certain issues arise, they also appear with all of the main players (don't get me started on HP of late!) as always it comes down to your relationship with the manaufacturer and the reseller that supplied them.

 

Guaranteed that if any of the issues above had been with our clients we'd have done everything in our power to support them, it's what separates companies like us from online e-tailers - service.

 

To anyone posting that you wouldn't consider purchasing them, i'd recommend taking us up on the reliability guarantee. After all there's no better way we can demonstrate our faith in them as a vendor than by putting our money where our mouths are.

 

Good to see Zoostorm on here also, I hope anyone with issues sees them resolved as swiftly as possible.

 

Joe

Edited July 1, 2014 by Haptic
Jeff Spelling

[synaesthesia]

@CPLTD: The amount we've bought are from you We shortly considered a batch return today, decided with stocks and timing we're better off resolving it ourselves. Your reliability guarantee was the main swinging point towards buying these as opposed to identical units from Very. The lower price of the Zoostorm units on it's own wouldn't have been enough otherwise, but that sort of guarantee shows you guys are comfortable enough with them (You're welcome to send someone down the road whilst we open a few to see what I mean)

[Haptic]

Perhaps my post should have read:

 

"...Guaranteed that if any of the issues above had been with our clients (and they'd have mentioned it!) we'd have done everything in our power to support them....":cool:

 

We can nip over and see them, however we take your word for it. We've discussed this with Zoostorm today and they'll be in touch swiftly.

 

Joe

[synaesthesia]

Cheers It's not the end of the world; it could even be pot luck that the one machine I opened to compare with the Very units and check the innard brands used and the second unit installed today were the only 2 friday builds of the bunch As has been said, we've all seen HP/Dell/Acer/Appple/insert other brand here machines suffer from "when did %company% hire stevie wonder to do their builds?" syndrome

[free780]

@rad uefi or BIOS ?

[rad]

Let me elaborate on the original post

 

The ZooStorm computers are built with an image on (unsure of 7 or8 as haven't booted but think its 8)

Changed BIOS to boot from network so I can PXE boot using the RM build/image environment.

Build fails immediately after entering credentials on "partition disk"

 

A call to ZooStorm gave the initial response, so I logged a call with RM who provided a link to a Tec article. Quite simply the RMsystem doesn't like the ZooStorm image and requires the HDD to be cleaned using a CMD prompt. Once cleaned/formatted the RM image will then progresses normally.

 

Please note, this is probably a get around to sort but I haven't had the chance to look into it further.

 

Thanks to ZooStorm for PM'ing me to investigate further.