vintage computers and lead poisoning?

There is also the issue of preventive maintenance. Mechanical stuff does benefit from _correct_ lubrication from time to time, alignment needs to be checked, and so on. Doing that sort of thing without the manual is somewhat difficult (Oh, and don't assume the manufacturer got it right. Putting a catseye disk in _new_ 3.5" drives is quite an eye-opener !) Oh, most of the itme it's the NiCds that fail in those lights (and you don't need a manual for that!) I have this ingrained objection to Haynes manuals, based on their car manuals, which are totally inferior to the real thing. Important stuff is missed out, some jobs are claimed to be impossible at home (hmmm, I'll decide what I can do, thank you), etc.... Decent washing machines (and dishwahsers) have at least a wiring diagram tucked inside somewhere. Often with a timer cycle chart if it's a mechanical timer. I don't think you need much more than that. That depends on how long you intend to keep it for. I'd be upset if something failed 3 times in a year, but I'd expect to have to do rather more than 3 repairs in, say, 50 years. Ask if the manual contains the circuit diagrams. If they won't tell you, get suspicious. If they tell you it does, and it turns out that it doesn't, then you most certainly can return it for a refund. Mauritron used to be OK when they sold copies of manuals on paper. Since I object to manuals on CD (they are totally unusable on a workbench, and I am not spending 5 minutes per page to print the darn things [1]) I no longer deal with them [1] Most of that time is taken downloading the bitmap from the Mac to a Laserwriter over localtalk... FWIW, I've never seen a TV or VCR manaul without a full schematic, but I've not seen any really modern ones. Maybe you know that I put quality of construction and performance way above convenience of use :-) More expensive stuff tends to be better made, tends to work better, and is more pleasant to use. No, but modern stuff is so darn poorly made that I don't want to be anywhere near it. And the quality of pictures on most modern TVs is horrible (put a crosshatch generator on one sometime and look at the convergence errors). No thanks!. The quality of the programmes is a separate issue of course, and one that I can do nothing about. That's why I specified _HP_ calculator (as if there's any other serious brand :-)). People will pay \pounds 25 for me to repair the card reader in their HP65 (worth a few hundred quid). Incidendtally, the fact that I do said repairs for money doesn't mean I won't help you fix your own HP calculator if you want to . The real reason that I charge is that otherwise I'd have millions of card reader rollers to repair, and quite honestly they get boring fast. Oh well... Now HP calculators -- real HP calculators -- are quite interesting inside. DIL packaged ICs, 2 phase clocks, serial buses between the CPU and memory, and so on. I've got a large pile of notes on the internals of just about every HP desktop and handheld calculator up to the 71B Correct. Do you think I've too cheap or too expensive? I assume the former. Problem is, if I charged \pounds 100 per hour, nobody would pay it. So I have a choice of charging a sensible rate and getting no jobs coming in, or charging far to little and at least getting a few machines to repair. -tony