EU

Tony Duell wrote: No, you'd rather sell them a replacement drive than have them replace some $1 component (I've seen a Wren, there's a lot that can be field-repaired on one, expecially given a schematic). ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ---- Billy: Once again you missed the point. Sure there's a few items on Wren that could be repaired. Though in all the hundreds of thousands built, I never saw a single PCB failure. And I wish you would consider your time as valuable. Repair, as you said earlier, is not about the 10P resistor but about the knowledge and experience of the technician. It is not free. Maybe everybody, could fix it without damaging it. But if they didn't, then the manufacturer is liable for the botched repair. And don't say this didn't happen. For almost 10 years, those of us in Field Service had to go out and clean up the messes that so called trained engineers created. I have enough stories about the idiocy prevalent in the computer repair field, that I've started writing a book about some of them. We did not want to cater to this tiny miserable bunch that caused so much grief and expense, so we forced a change. And it became a standard for peripheral companies. Eliminating maintenance and repair on hard drives saved tens of millions of dollars and raised our customer satisfaction enormously. The main point is: to accommodate the whimsy of one hobbyist, we would have had to invest 100's of thousands of dollars in technical manuals, keep them up to date, make them available. The Wren had more than 50 variations - I know because I had to track them. It would have required a staff of 20 to keep the manuals accurate. Making a maintenance manual available would have been a disastrous financial mistake. And for what purpose? Only one person in the world would use this documentation. Everyone else would prefer to spend the $50 on a new drive than risk reusing a repaired one Billy.