26 Oct
2005
26 Oct
'05
12:49 p.m.
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:
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
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. 
26 Oct
26 Oct
8:32 p.m.
Board swaping and component replacement both have their place and that
I am trying (and failing) to think of any justification for replacing
parts without a good reason to do so. And a lot of board-swapping is just
that (you know, replace the processor, memory, video, etc boards in order
until the machine works again).
place depends on your particular philosophy and goals.
For myself, I
look at component replacement as a way actually learning how things work
That is one reason I spend a lot of time producing my own schematics and
repair notes for machines that don't otherwise have useful service
information. To produce a meaningful, understandable, schematic, you have
to understand what is going on.
instead of shotgunning a problem until it appears to
have been solved.
The emphasis here should be on 'appears'. Unless you do tests to find
what is actually wrong, you can never know you've cured the fault (even
replacing the whole machine won't do that if the problem is external!).
Particularly for intermittant faults, this is very unsatisfactory.
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 :).
I am not convinced. Probably swapping boards will get the machine doing
something more quickly, but it may well fail again fairly soon afterwards
(seen it all too often). Personally, I'd rather spend a little more time
putting it right _now_ and then have it work properly for a sensible time
thereafter.
[...]
Anyway, last time I checked, this was the classiccmp list. You can't
board-swap a classic computer, becuase most of the time you don't have a
set of known-good boards to swap in (if you did, you'd make another
example of the machine from them). Swapping in possibly defective boards
is a total waste of time
And you don't want to risk damaging any boards you do have due to faults
elsehwere in the machine.
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.
Yes, but have you tried buying kits for such things now? At least over
here, thanks to our ridiculous interpretation of the EMC directives, kits
are almost unobtainable.
And even components are getting more difficult to find. Yes, there are
plenty of places on the net to get stuff, most, if not all, will take
credit cards (or Paypal, or...) and send you the stuff. But the days of
being able to pop into a local shop for a 1k resistor are very much over.
-tony
27 Oct
27 Oct
4:38 a.m.
Tony Duell wrote:
And even components are getting more difficult to
find. Yes, there are
plenty of places on the net to get stuff, most, if not all, will take
credit cards (or Paypal, or...) and send you the stuff. But the days
of being able to pop into a local shop for a 1k resistor are very
much over.
Maplins still have shops and they still sell components - they
had LDRs available when I needed one a few months ago.
Admittedly most of the shop if full of kits and pre-built
stuff, but they still do individual components.
They aren't local (to me) though.
Antonio
--
Antonio carlini
arcarlini at iee.org
3:49 p.m.
Maplins still have shops and they still sell
components - they
had LDRs available when I needed one a few months ago.
Admittedly most of the shop if full of kits and pre-built
stuff, but they still do individual components.
Maplin still list compoents in the catalogue, but I've lost count of the
number of common devices that are 'speical order only'. At least one of
the local Maplins doesn't even keep common values of resistors in the
shop. So this does not solve the problem of getting a 10k resistor on a
saturday afternnon...
-tony
6849
days inactive
6850
days old
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arcarlini＠iee.org -
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