I kinda steered this thread off-topic, but I agree with your point. Some people use their PC for nothing but word processor, email, and browsing the web. Actually more than a few… So a machine that is 10 yrs old works well enough for that. My ex-father in law, and sister in law, are still both using the systems I built for them in 1998… Ex father in law still uses dial up 56k if you can believe that… Last June at my sons graduation barbecue, my ex’s sister wanted to “upgrade” her memory from 512k to 1 gb, and asked me what kind of memory she needed… It had been so long, I had to go to her house to see what kind I had put in it… Man, what a dinosaur! I asked her why the heck she hadn’t upgraded, fast desktops are so cheap, and her answer was quite simple. It does all she needs, and she likes the system… Still using Win 98, and not sure exactly what you mean, but she says she still gets windows update notices… So either she doesn’t know what she’s talking about (she could be meaning who knows how far back is "still getting notices), but if she’s right, that would mean they are still supporting that OS… My wife hated Vista, and wanted XP back, and Vista would NOT let me roll back… BUT… I was able to roll it back to Win 98 from an old disk (how can that be, I have no idea), and then “upgrade” to XP for her… The real biatch was figuring out what drivers I needed, and finding them for her configuration. That’s the problem with the way they sell PC’s now, no install disks anymore, just the damn partitioned “restore” drive…
Point being, in the electronics world, with effort and patience, “Dinosaurs” can still be used and repaired… Not in the world of Hearing Aids though…
Oh, and not sure I covered this, but the deal with the Perseo’s ended up being VA proprietary chip… So only the VA could program them.
And the guy I was complaining about being a shady seller (and someone slammed me for criticizing someone trying to help) was the same guy that charged me $50 for one earpiece (the simple cone kind) and “cleaning”… When my cat again chewed up that one, another dealer gave me 3 of them, and did an audiogram, AND re-programmed the aid for free!!
I told them what the other guy charged for the one, and “cleaning” an aid that I keep meticulously clean, and their response was “you’re kidding, right?”… So the guy IS a ripoff artist, and I can only imagine how many old folks the guy has scammed…
But just like any other business, you have great people and you have scum. It’s too bad the great hearing aid folks can’t or wont weed out the scammers… But I think it’s kind of like Lawyers and Police… No one wants to “Rat Out” “One of our own”…
Whew! Long post… Sorry… :rolleyes: