Prices & Rants(was: Future Computing Trends. Still is, I gu

From: Max Eskin <maxeskin_at_hotmail.com>
Date: Sun Feb 22 19:45:11 1998

I apologize for any weird layout, but this IS Lynx...(as always for me)

>> Missed my point; I prefer to buy quality one if I can find one and
>> that floppy example is what I'm driving at.
If I had money...
>> Mitsumi and Epson floppy drives are junk. I had too many of those
>> fail before year is up and use was not that heavy. Panasonic and few
>> Teac is just o. k. but not on my esteemed list. Also those cheapo
I had a drive problem once. It was intermittent, and I never could
understand what was wrong. Eventually, I swapped the cable and the
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!
>The one advantage of Teac drives is that you can get the service/repair
>manual. I have it for several versions of the FD55 (5.25" drive) and
the
>FD235 (3.5" drive). It means you can be _sure_ your drive is correctly
>aligned.
I wouldn't bother if I had to.
>What floppy drives would you recomend?
Punched card, IBM ,circa 1928.



>> more noisy. PSU have cheap parts inside and fan will fail inside. I
>> do have bunch of PSU's with failed fans and all of them are sleeve
>> bearing type, very doubtful of finding one with ball bearing fans
>
Once again, I wouldn't bother with such minor details when I run
Windows 95. My Fan howls when I boot, then stops after a few minutes.
I read an article once on how to replace a PSU fan with a silent
external one.
>The worst PC-clone part I own is a keyboard. One day when using it, the
>manual for my 'scope slipped off the top of a PDP8e that's alongside my
PC
>and landed on the keyboard. The result was that many keys on the
keyboard
>failed to work. I spent the next _3 hours_ removing bits of broken SRBP
>circuit board and soldering wires all over the place. Amazingly there
was
>a schematic printed on the box that the keyboard came in (which I'd cut
>out and filed), but (I guess) not too suprisingly it was incorrect!.
I keep bumping into kb's that have plastic film instead of PCBs.
The problem is that sometimes, the film will bend down, and not detect
the key, so I have to bash it. (Which I do enough anyway, given my OS)

>
>And don't get me started on monitors. Is it too much to ask for a
monitor
Well, now that we have LCDs, it should get better, though LCD can be
crap too. Don't have to worry about focus, transformers, etc. But I'm
sure that they'll figure out something to screw up.
>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
of the computer, after the rest of it :)

In old machines, everything was hackable anyway, so that any bugs
in hardware or software could be easily fixed by the likes of us.
In modern machines, its too complicated to fix anyway, and one would
never have the time to fix all of the bugs, and for me, hardware is a
minor problem (since it never breaks for me anyway, even when I try)

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Received on Sun Feb 22 1998 - 19:45:11 GMT

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