Board swaping and component replacement both have their place and that
place depends on your particular philosophy and goals. For myself, I
look at component replacement as a way actually learning how things work
instead of shotgunning a problem until it appears to have been solved.
Actually understanding how something works leads to progress while I
*firmly* believe that the board swapping only mentality leads on a
spiral path downwards. Board swapping is the obvious answer to the time
problem of reducing downtime ... most of the time :).
A good analagy that most of us have run into is the "my
son/daughter/friend/??? is an expert with computers and can fix
anything." Most of these people are called experts *only* because of
they know a bit more than the person making the comment. Knowing how to
reformat and reinstall an OS has its place, but without knowing what is
going on, it is really easy to reinstall the same problems that
generated the "Oh, you need to reformat the HD ..."
And Tony's comment about "that's the way things are done ..." is a
great
statement that I fully believe in and support!!!
A sad (to me anyway) commentary on people in the US are the number of
people who prefer to buy an assembled and tested unit instead of
building it themselves when given an option.
On Fri, 21 Oct 2005, Tony Duell wrote:
Boardswapping
has a place and is a legitimate part of the history of
computers going way, way back. It is how things were and are done, and
I have never found 'that's the way things are done' to be a sufficient
reason for carrying on doing them that way.
If you can prove that your repair business model would be more
successful
than the one that has evolved over time in the electronics industry then
you should write a book and become a consultant and make millions. Why
waste your breath with a bunch of geeks like us?
--
Sellam Ismail Vintage Computer
Festival