More Bringing up a CPM

From: Dwight Elvey <elvey_at_hal.com>
Date: Wed Jun 2 19:16:19 1999

ard_at_p850ug1.demon.co.uk (Tony Duell) wrote:
> The general public are _much_ worse. Most of them can't describe a fault
> correctly even when asked. Heck, most of them can't even answer direct
> questions about the fault (like : 'Is there anything on the screen at
> all'). Or even read make/model numbers off a nameplate.

 "Ahhh, it doesn't work, must be a short some place."

Quote of symptom for anything electrical that I hear.

 It is interesting that when someone does give good information
about a failure, sometimes the guy that fixes it doesn't get
to see it. Many years back, I had a hard disk that was
causing troubles in a computer ( Convergent Tech, pre PC ).
The problem only happened when the unit got hot and you
could see that it looked like the stepper was missing a phase
of the step sequence. I carefully noted these things in
the space provided for symptoms in the return for repair
form that I got from Shugart. About 2 weeks later, I received
the drive back from Shugart and re-installed it. It
had the same problem.
 Being local to their shop, I went over there and asked to
talk to the tech that did the work. They were reluctant
but finally said OK. On going to ask him why he hadn't fixed
the problem, I discovered that he had never seen the note
on the form. It was separated at incoming and he ran the standard
5 minute test, installed a new belt and stamped it passed.
I made some noise about having some way to pass the symptoms
on to the guy that was repairing it and they gave me a
maintenance manual. It took me 15 mins to warm it up to fail
and 2 mins to find the bad transistor, with schematic in hand.
 So, when you see the space on a return form for symptoms,
you might just as well put what they expect:

 "Ahhh, it doesn't work, must be a short some place."


Later
Dwight
Received on Wed Jun 02 1999 - 19:16:19 BST