23 Feb
1998
23 Feb
'98
1:58 p.m.
drive, and it
works now. The only FDD I've bought was a 3.5" TEAC
for $70 at the world's worst store- CompUSA. It actually has a metal
frame!
You mean some drives have a plastic chassis these days? No wonder people
experience data loss... Well, while it may not make much sense to repair a
drive when you can
easily buy a replacement (although I'm darn glad I've got some 8" drive
repair manuals - you can't buy replacements for those), I _always_ check
the alignment of every new drive I get. I've had some brand-new drives
that are marginal (checked on a know-good alignment disk), and, quite
simply, my data is worth the time taken to make sure that the disk can be
read back - on that, or on any other drive.
Great idea but how I afford a alignment
disk? Very rare use and
expensive.
What floppy drives would you recomend?
Punched
card, IBM ,circa 1928. Actually, the true-blue IBM keyboard I'm typing on
at the moment is one
of those plastic membrane ones. It's never given me any trouble, though...
Correct.
LK201's (DEC VT220 etc keyboards) are another
story. I must have
dismantled and rebuilt a few dozen of those - even to the extent of
trimming back the moulded-over studs and dismantling the keys and the
membrane 'sandwich'. What a pain!
That one! That is horrible keyboard,
nearly impossible to repair!
crap too.
Don't have to worry about focus, transformers, etc. But I'm
sure that they'll figure out something to screw up.
No, there are obscure surface-mount drivers (or worse, direct-on-board
chips, or even on the glass itself) to fail. And zebra strips to go
intermittant on the smaller units. And backlights to fail in expensive
ways... I'll stick to the CRT, thank you. I can understand
those, I can see the
components, and I can bodge a repair somehow...
I once jokingly said that there are 2 types of mono monitor CRT - ones
with a thick neck, B8H base and 6.3V heater and ones with a thin neck,
B7G base and 12V heater. Having done a number of swaps in my life, I'm
not sure it was so much of a joke...
Well, the user manual for my Barco explains how to set it up (it's a real
user manual, with schematics and parts lists and waveforms...). The list
of equipment needed, and the time taken to do it properly are both quite
long. You can bet that a lot of no-name monitors have never seen a colour
analyser or a geometry test slide.
Hear hear!! My friend have a RCA CTC130x I
have not able to find
the "x" part to be certain so I could order or recover the
convergence assembly because this one has a preset split bead tied
shut by a nylon tie at time of manufacture! By the way I have the
picture of the tv in gif format if someone wants a viewing.
worse than
the 17 year old Barco I happen to have...
Out of ten new Performas, about half have
darker monitors. We don't
know why. It seems that the monitor is the second least reliable part That's one reason I stick to that old PC I
mentioned in a previous
message. I have schematics to _everything_ apart from the hard disk, and
most of it is standard chips anyway. I have the source to the BIOS ROM
(It's an IBM - the source is in the techref) and the source to the OS and
untilities (it's Linux). So there's not a lot I can't hack or fix.
True, but I would do that if I had great teachers and great loads of
cheap docs then I would qualify as hacker like you do, but I lack
very specific tools like oscilloscope etc and my past histories
did'nt made everything else happen like this so I have to start
somewhere and start hacking away when I have resources once again.
-tony
Jason D.
email: jpero(a)cgo.wave.ca
Pero, Jason D.