Altera Technical Support for graduate students

[Altera_Forum]

I'm a physics graduate student desinging with FPGAs for the first time. I initially began with a Xilinx evaluation board (they are a local company so I figured I'd try them first) but have not been satisfied with their technical support. In fact, as a graduate student, the only technical support that I can get is to browse the user forums. They directly support professors only.  

 What I want to know is, what are people's (particularly students) experience with altera's technical support?   To be truthful, I don't understand Xilinx's policy regarding professors only because professors won't be the one's introducing FPGAs into research labs, it will be the graduate students who deal with those types of details.

[Altera_Forum]

Their rationale is that students ask simple questions, expecialy when they are begining. And they just do not have the time to answer those. 

The problem could simply be avoided if all students would read the user manual before asking questions. But everybody knows that is not the way they normaly "operate" :)

[Altera_Forum]

Yes that is true, but I'm pretty good about asking intelligent questions. My problem was that the evaluation board comes with a compact flash card that runs various examples/demos. However, the cf card that I received was for the wrong evaluation board:rolleyes:. It took me 3 weeks to get the correct "access approval" to actually talk to someone to get the problem resolved. No support should make you jump through that many hoops.

[Altera_Forum]

So far I used both X and A support. I found both to be OK, although in X I once waited one year for a bug fix.