compucolor

[Tony Duell]

> > It's one possibilty. It could also have been a lot of other things, drive 
> > or controller related. Personally, I'd have done a lot more tests before 
> > twiddling anything (but then again, I once spent an afternoon figuring 
> > out why a CBM 8250 was ubreliable on one drive, only to find the cause 
> > was dirty heads...)
> 
> True, in an ideal world I would have the time to do stuff like that. 
> For my job I get paid to spend the time to do things right.  For home 
> projects where I can sometimes go weeks without a free hour and more 
> typically have one to two hours a night to tinker, I get a lot more fast 

I've heard the reverse from other people -- for their job, 'anything will 
do' provided it gets the problem moved to someone else, but for their 
hobbies they spend as much time as needed to do it right, becuase that's 
what they enjoy doing. For most of us here, classic computers are a 
hobby. We mess around with them because we enjoy it, we want to get them 
working and use them, but it doesn't really matter if it takes a few more 
days -- there's no deadline... Sure there are jobs we don't like 
(cleaning keycaps one at a time has to be high on that list for me...), 
but most of the time we're having fun. And it therefore makes sense IMHO 
to get things done in the best way we can...

Personally, I always try to do things properly, whether I am being paid 
for it or not. 


> and loose.  Tony, as far as I can tell, your job *is* answering cctalk 
> questions.  :-)

Many a true word is spoken in jest. Nobody is likely to employ me again, 
so I might as well share what little knowledge I have here

> I have the service manual that compucolor put out for the machine.  they 
> give a procedure for doing a quick and dirty alignment (twiddle four 
> pots corresponding to convergence in the top, bottom, left, and right 

This is an in-line tube, right, not a delta-gun? It sounds a little unusual.

> Tony you may shake your head at my cavalier attitude about the state of 
> the hardware, but I feel like what I'm doing isn't harming the machine 
> and if I (or the next owner) wants to do it right, I haven't precluded 

Firstly with regard to adjustments, they rarely, if ever, drift. If 
something needs re-adjusting then there is a fault. Maybe an adjustment 
will provide a temporary fix, maybe not...

There are several types of adjustmnets. There are those that, if you get 
them wrong, will do major damage -- like PSU voltage tweakers. There are 
those that take a lot of skill and equipment to set up properly (some of 
the mechanicla adjustmments in hard drives, for example). And there are 
those that are relatively easy to set up, and which don't do damage if 
you get them wrong. Your disk spindle speed pot is one of the last types. 
And in that case there is little harm in adjusting it to see what happens.

What I want to discourage is the idea of tweaking things at random in the 
hope it'll fix the problem. It won't, you'll probably make things a lot 
worse. 

Of course in some circumstances, adjusting things and seeing the effect 
on the fault can give useful information. But only do this if you know 
you can set things up again afterwards.

As regards a 'cavalier attitude' to hardware, it depends on how 
experienced you are. Some people might hear the noise of the spindle 
motor (say) and know it's running way off speed. The rest of us have to 
make measurements first :-). Experienced ASR33 hackers can probably test 
most spring tensions with their fingers -- and find the bit that's too 
stiff, or too tight, or... The rest of us do battle with a tension gauge 
and the service manual. And so on...

-tony