26 Oct
2005
26 Oct
'05
10:40 p.m.
On Thu, 27 Oct 2005 05:40:43 +0100
Jules Richardson <julesrichardsonuk at yahoo.co.uk> wrote:
Tony Duell wrote:
A service environment where all the service techs were 'artisans' who constantly
tweaked and improved each board out in the field would be a servicing nightmare. There
wouldn't be any consistent service, and every site that had been visited would have
totally uncontrolled hardware revisions.
A service-bureau approach, where the techs in the field are trained boardswappers who ship
boards back for rework by qualified staff at a repair depot makes the most sense, from a
business, and from a technical point of view.
It just plain _doesn't_make_sense_ for highly qualified experts to be out driving
around in vans scraping dirt and reseating boards. There is a hierarchy of expertise
within any organization, and component level troubleshooters belong at the repair depot.
--
http://sasteven.multics.org/MacSE30/MacSE30.html
As regards what's more successful, _every_
time I've tried
board-swapping, I've had more problems than I started with. When I find
the fault using test gear, I put it right, and the machine stays working.
Quite likely board-swapping will get the machine to do _something_ again
in a shorter time than finding the fault properly, but doing the latter
will get the machine doing the _right_ thing, and will make sure it keeps
on doing that.
You know, that always surprises me - I'd expect board swapping to rarely
cause problems for reasonably modular systems (I can believe it with
such as DEC hardware though, where you so much as cough near it and
something breaks ;)
Depends on the nature of the fault I suppose. For field faults on
current hardware I would expect board swapping to hardly ever make
things worse (my annoyance there would be if failed boards were just
tossed rather than being fixed back at base). For restoring classic
machines that may have been kept in bad conditions or not powered up in
years, it's likely a different story!