22 Jun
2005
22 Jun
'05
12:49 p.m.
Tony Duell wrote:
Hang on though, a motherboard is a cheap(-ish) off-the-shelf component.
What do you do if a bearing goes bad? Do you buy a new bearing, or do
you build up the track with weld, grind it back, and have it hard chromed?
Depends on the bearing. For a ball or roller race, I replace it -- it's a
standard part. For something like a phosphor bronze bush, I might well
make my own replacement. It would depend on the ease of getting the
original part, the lead time on it, etc...
There is one other bif difference. If I need a ball race for a 10-year-old
motor, I can almost certainly get it, off the shelf. If not, then it's
not too hard to modify the motor housing to take a bearing I can get.
Now just try getting a new motherboard for a 10 year old PC. One that
will use the same processor, memory, and expansion cards. I think you'll
have problems. Heck, even the case and PSU might need to be changed. I
have no intention of replacing the whole machine every time some trivial
component fails.
harddrives
go up on me (Admittingly, IBM DEATHSTARTS), one
motherboard that ate ram for Breakfast!
Now, you see, I'd have wanted to figure out what was wrong with said
motherboard _before_ it damaged more than one set of RAMs. I guess it
does. I don't -- yet -- haev a clean room to repair
winchester-type hard drives. Although I have considered some kind of
'clean box' to work on the physically larger winchseters, like the 8" and
14" drives in some of my classics.
That actually sounds like an useful and easy thing to make. Something
like a big glovebox, possibly. You might not get your 14" drives in. You may be able to adapt a sandblasting cabinet -
it's designed to keep
dust *in*, so it should be OK at keeping dust *out*.
Incidentally, one of the older demountables -- I think it was the DEC
RK01 -- used a standard car air filter as the absolute filter. You might
get away with something like that, and a suitable fan, to run the 'clean box'
Of course,
can't refute the argument about the internet
connection :)
Or the space. The dexktop area needed by a laptop and printer is not that
much smaller than that needed by a desktop PC + not-too-large monitor +
printer.