Electronics Barn closing

From: Fred N. van Kempen <waltje_at_pdp11.nl>
Date: Tue Aug 3 00:15:11 2004

On Tue, 3 Aug 2004, Tony Duell wrote:

> The actual job of soldering in a surface mount device (or even easier a
> pin-trough-hole device) doesn't take much skill. The skill is in finding
> the dead component.
Most people cant solder *at all*, Tony. They can, however, eject
a bad board, and insert a new one, if told how.

> > in that field. In the service industry, time is money, to field techs
> > did (and still do) board- or system-level swapping, and the (skilled)
> Which is why you'd think the customer would want it fixed right first
> time....
Guess what? Usually, in my experience, board-swapping fixed the problem
at hand, as far as the customers were concerned. Meaning, contract
dealines were met, all were happy, *including* the guys at the repair
stations who got their hands onto fixing the actual component-level
problems.

> I have never understood how you can trust diagnostics running on a
> machine that's malfunctioning (and yes, I have seen this problem too).
Those diagnostics are run independently, Tony, by each component, so
there is no "malfunctioning system" as a whole. Board-level monitoring
has been around for a while- it works. I know, sooner than a customer
does, that part of one of their systems is going to fail, and, usually,
why. Meaning, I can get a replacement part, go over there, install
it, and no problems. One customer actually said "ok, lets wait and
see then", and, sure enough, three days later one of the drives in
his array fried. Yeah, well, if the drive reports extreme temp
changes and speed (rpm) changes, it really does mean it.

--f
Received on Tue Aug 03 2004 - 00:15:11 BST