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

[Jules Richardson]

Tony Duell wrote:
>>>Unless you know what/where the fault is, you can't know you've fixed it 
>>>IMHO (I've explained the problems many times before).
>>
>>With a proper 'boardswapping guide' and strong documentation and 
>>training, the tech can be assured that the fault is isolated to the 
>>board in question.  Then, as a _team_member_ he passes the faulty board 
> 
> 
> I fail to see how, at least without doing further tests and measurements 
> (some of which can be quite complicated). I've yet to see a system where 
> symptoms alone with determine the faulty module with 100% reliability.

Yes, but I suppose in the field a company's not aiming for 100% 
reliability. If the amount of customers annoyed/inconvenienced by 
incorrect boardswaps is less than those annoyed by the time it takes for 
a 'proper' tech to diagnose the fault with their hardware then the 
boardswapping approach makes more business sense and keeps more of their 
customers happy.

I know it's a shame it's like that - if I were in that field I'd much 
rather be tooling around in a van doing component-level fixes than doing 
it in a warehouse somewhere :)

>>There need to be 'grunt' foot soldiers who know how to pull a board 
>>from the chassis, replace it with a known good board, and ship the board 
>>back to the repair depot where an expert will pinpoint the problem down 
>>to a specific chip and send feedback to engineering so the new Rev. J 
> 
> You know as well as I do that it doesn't work that way for most, if not 
> all, of the machines that _we_ work with, and probably never has. The 
> sort of failed servoids I've met just look at the symptoms, pull a part, 
> put a new one in, and hope the problem is cured. AFAIK the defective part 
> is _not_ analysed futher.

Yes, that's the unfortunate problem with computing today (or any 
electronic consumer goods). People seem happy to just throw perfectly 
fixable stuff away because it's cheaper for a business to just pay 
someone to make more than it is to pay someone to fix the broken item. 
That seems incredibly stupid in the longer term, but who thinks long 
term any more...

On the plus side it means people like most of the inhabitants of this 
list can get some pretty cool broken stuff for free and fix it for 
almost nothing except time... :)

> Well, actually, I do refuse to use anything I don't properly understand, 
> but that is another issue.

apart from your brain ;-)

> Actually I am trying to think of anything I own and depend on (or even 
> use actively) that I am not capable of repairing.... I'd have problems 
> with a wristwatch, but pocket watches and clocks wouldn't be a problem. 
> Nor, for example, are real cameras.

see above :)

cheers

Jules