Altair Fan

[Tony Duell]

> 
> Dang, seems an awful lot to maintain something that, in my
> experience, has a very low failure rate... I've had three

Low does not equal zero :-). HP calculators were built extremely well, 
they had a low failure rate, but I am glad I produced repair info for 
many of them.

> harddrives go up on me (Admittingly, IBM DEATHSTARTS), one
> motherboard that ate ram for Breakfast!

Now, you see, I'd have wanted to figure out what was wrong with said 
motherboard _before_ it damaged more than one set of RAMs.

> Perhaps a cheap laptop off ebay of decent ability (Say a P2
> or similar) would suit you well? Even something with dead

Laptops are even more difficult to work on, even more difficult to find 
parts for (even board-level spares are often hard to find), and have no 
expansion slots....

> I understand the urges to be able to repair your equipment,
> but dosn't it stop somewhere? :)

I guess it does. I don't -- yet -- haev a clean room to repair 
winchester-type hard drives. Although I have considered some kind of 
'clean box' to work on the physically larger winchseters, like the 8" and 
14" drives in some of my classics.

But I really don't think I have anything else that I couldn't repair if 
I had to. And that's the way I intend to keep things.

> 
> Of course, can't refute the argument about the internet
> connection :)

Or the space. The dexktop area needed by a laptop and printer is not that 
much smaller than that needed by a desktop PC + not-too-large monitor + 
printer.

-tony