Slashdot Mirror
The Guts Of An iPAQ
slashdot.org writes: "For anyone interested in the bowels of the iPAQ, this guy has taken one appart and put about a zillion pictures on a website. This may help for that in-dash installation you've been thinking about ;)" Cool engineering inside -- interesting to see the various companies that make the pieces going into one of these things, and a brave guy to take one apart. (iPAQs are still about 3 years from eBay prices for me.)
Why, oh why can't we just leave good enough alone? I mean, clay tablets are good enough for anyone. Why did someone have to go out and tinker with the design. Paper, I mean, yeeesh! The stuff burns! We shouldn't ever tweak any designs, it just messes things up!
Why did people have to take apart the math theories of the Pythagorean crowd? It was good enough in their hands alone. I mean nobody else needs that knowledge, right? We should leave stuff like that into the hands of professionals alone.
Especially those computers. I mean, what would happen if just anyone could make one in their garage? I mean, those pros at Apple never started by tinkering, I bet!
The Compaq PC have generally been nothing but trouble for our group. They lock up regularly, particularly on CAD or other graphic intensive work. They also are just generally rather flakey. Nothing huge, but it's kind of like the death of a thousand paper cuts. Weirdness with service packs, stability issues, odd software conflicts, etc. It just eats at you little by little until you are ready for some "percussive maintenance".
The other machines we have aren't without their quirks but the Compaq's seem to overall cause the most trouble. It's only the desktop PCs that seem to have issues. The servers and occasional laptop seem to work as well as any other make running Windows. Don't know why this is but it does seem to be an ongoing problem for us.
...is to get on a waiting list at your favorite tech store. I got on a Best Buy waiting list and got one in about a month, for retail price, not some inflated eBay price. They're doling them out in small increments to all the retail stores, so if you're on a list, you'll get one sooner or later. Don't fiddle around with online retailers who claim they have some or waste your money on eBay. It's not THAT important to have one RIGHT NOW (as opposed to a month from now).
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