Comment on 'boardswapping' as part of the computer CULTURE.

[Tony Duell]

> 
> 
> Board swaping and component replacement both have their place and that

I am trying (and failing) to think of any justification for replacing 
parts without a good reason to do so. And a lot of board-swapping is just 
that (you know, replace the processor, memory, video, etc boards in order 
until the machine works again).

> place depends on your particular philosophy and goals. For myself, I
> look at component replacement as a way actually learning how things work

That is one reason I spend a lot of time producing my own schematics and 
repair notes for machines that don't otherwise have useful service 
information. To produce a meaningful, understandable, schematic, you have 
to understand what is going on.

> instead of shotgunning a problem until it appears to have been solved.

The emphasis here should be on 'appears'. Unless you do tests to find 
what is actually wrong, you can never know you've cured the fault (even 
replacing the whole machine won't do that if the problem is external!). 
Particularly for intermittant faults, this is very unsatisfactory.

> Actually understanding how something works leads to progress while I
> *firmly* believe that the board swapping only mentality leads on a
> spiral path downwards. Board swapping is the obvious answer to the time
> problem of reducing downtime ... most of the time :).

I am not convinced. Probably swapping boards will get the machine doing 
something more quickly, but it may well fail again fairly soon afterwards 
(seen it all too often). Personally, I'd rather spend a little more time 
putting it right _now_ and then have it work properly for a sensible time 
thereafter.

[...]

Anyway, last time I checked, this was the classiccmp list. You can't 
board-swap a classic computer, becuase most of the time you don't have a 
set of known-good boards to swap in (if you did, you'd make another 
example of the machine from them). Swapping in possibly defective boards 
is a total waste of time

And you don't want to risk damaging any boards you do have due to faults 
elsehwere in the machine. 

> A sad (to me anyway) commentary on people in the US are the number of
> people who prefer to buy an assembled and tested unit instead of
> building it themselves when given an option.

Yes, but have you tried buying kits for such things now? At least over 
here, thanks to our ridiculous interpretation of the EMC directives, kits 
are almost unobtainable. 

And even components are getting more difficult to find. Yes, there are 
plenty of places on the net to get stuff, most, if not all, will take 
credit cards (or Paypal, or...) and send you the stuff. But the days of 
being able to pop into a local shop for a 1k resistor are very much over.

-tony