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Consumers Starting To Realize Gadgets Can Be Fixed
An anonymous reader writes "Consumers seem to be paying more attention to the possibility of fixing gadgets instead of sending them to the landfill. It may be because 10gb in your iPod is more than enough for any normal person, it may be a deep, abiding love for the environment or it may just be the price. A New York Times article explores how new sites like FixYa and old standbys like Macintouch can aid the average user in restoring their 'slightly used' gear. Practically every gadget has their own website devoted to helping owners help each other deal with problems that arise. I personally like AVS Forum for my living room needs. From the article: 'Most other gadgets come with batteries that are easy to replace without custom tools. Replacement batteries for cellphones are often marked up by the devices' manufacturers, while third-party replacements are often available for 60 percent to 80 percent less. Companies offering replacement batteries for iPods often offer better batteries with higher capacities and longer lifetimes. Ipodjuice.com, for instance, sells a 1,200-milliamp-hour battery that will replace the 600-milliamp-hour battery that shipped with a fourth-generation iPod -- an improvement that lets the Web site claim that the repaired iPod will "last 100 percent longer."'"
I'm fixed my PS2 several times when it's stopped reading discs thanks to online guides.
Bought the thing used in 2003 for under 100 bucks and she's still holding together thanks to the great fix-it communities. (And I'm generally horrible at hardware)
"I only speak the truth"
Karma: null(Mostly affected by an unassigned variable)
Fixing stuff is nothing new. Until the 80s or so fixng everything was common. A lot of the problems are due to one of two things: people want an upgrade anyway, and something breaking is a good excuse; massive integration makes it harder, if not impossible, to service some devices.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
but let's face it, this is almost certainly the result of economics, rather than some magical new sensitivity for the environment.
Call me when people start putting effort into recycling or repairing their $25 gizmo, instead of when they decide to shell out $100 for the repair of a $300 item.
The title of this article should probably be something like "expensive gadgets not such a commodity item for middle class Americans, after all"
Interested in a Flash-based MAME front end? Visit mame.danzbb.com
I think this may have more to do with the abilityto upgrade computers. Due to the original IBM PC architecture, it was easy to make your computer run better - some simple screws, plug-in cards, simple electrical connections. Lots of folks who would never dream of opening up their VCR - still flashing 12:00 - have upgraded memory or a hard drive.
Now those same folks who have cut their teeth on PC's look at broken electronic gadgetry and think:
1) How hard can it be?
2) If I screw it up, no big deal - it's a loss now as it is.
"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." A. Carlson
From the article: 'Most other gadgets come with batteries that are easy to replace without custom tools.
When i'm working on a piece of electronic equipment and I see "custom tools", my brain responds with "hammer". But then, that might be part of the problem in the first place.
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
with less integrated stuff, fix-it-yourself was more of an option. I don't know how I'd go about trying to "fix" something where some resistor or cap on the board had gone bad.
Interested in a Flash-based MAME front end? Visit mame.danzbb.com
Printer manufacturers should also encourage inkjet cartridge refilling as opposed to making people throw these away. Some manufacturers even resort to embedding chips in their cartridges to prevent these from being refilled by 3rd party companies or the by the user.
Ah, the perfect thread to brag about an accomplishment about which I am (perhaps even unduly so) proud. You see, I have a Netgear combination ADSL modem/router, and after about 3 years of use it started to sporadically malfunction. The connection would drop, sometimes not coming back until the next day, only to quickly drop again. After a painful call to SBC (now ATT) tech support, I was able to determine that it was not a line problem. Being that the router wasn't exactly cheap (150ish?), I hated to buy a new one, so I went searching online...
:P (I could be described, when it comes to electronics, as at BEST a very inexperienced hobbyist)
Interestingly, I eventually discovered that I had been the unwitting casualty of industrial espionage! Apparently, a capacitor company, wanting to do things on the cheap, had tried to steal the recipe that a rival company used to manufacture capacitors. Apparently, however, the rival company got wind of this and planted a FAKE recipe for the ne'erdowell to find. The eventual fallout was that a little while down the road, this company's faulty capacitors started malfunction en masse.
Long story short, my modem used one such capacitor, and apparently a great many users were reporting similar problems. So, out come my trusty soldering iron and jeweler's screwdrivers, and the modem is quickly disassembled. Lo and behold, there is indeed a bulging capacitor. A quick trip to radio shack and a little painstaking soldering work later, I had a DSL modem working good as new. That was about two years ago, and I'm still using the same modem.
I'm still pretty damn proud of myself
...everything looks like a nail.
People look at me funny (ok, there may be other reasons) when I take
apart my MS Natural keyboard.
If you've never taken one apart before, it's hard to appreciate just
how well designed they are. They seem to have been designed for washing
from the ground up.
I unscrew and pull apart the shell and wash the key modules and shell
in the sink at work. The rubber spring pads are also easy to clean. The
microfiche type layers get wiped with a damp cloth and I set the whole
thing out to dry on the vent.
Yeah, a new keyboard costs 20$ and my keyboard is starting to yellow,
but why throw it out ?
http://www.ifixit.com/ is a great resource for everthing Mac mobile. (iPods and lappys)
In theory, theory always works in practice. In practice, theory rarely works. <><
Replacement batteries for cellphones are often marked up by the devices' manufacturers, while third-party replacements are often available for 60 percent to 80 percent less.
Ummmm... You sure you want to recommend that?
LA LA LA *fingers in the ears*
Oh no this just isn't happening! Hardware is so cheap and replaceable now that we're all going to be paying for software that comes with its own FREE hardware in just a few years! Welcome to our brave new electronic commodity frontier!
If moderation could change anything, it would be illegal.
The Internet caused a real breakthrough in fixing stuff for me - before, I'd have to find someone who knew more than I did, or hit the library, or just figure it out myself. Now I can find parts for my old Mercedes and my Fiat, repair the lawn mower, put a new power supply in my old LaserJet, recap my Marantz amplifier, refoam my Bose woofers - repair all nice old stuff that probably would have been tossed out without the ability to easily search for repair hints and sources of parts.
12:50 - press return.
I didn't know we were measuring capacity based on the weight of the bits these days. Are more poignant songs heavier?
"It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education." -Albert Einstein
The same advice applies to more than just electronic gadgets. How about appliances?
I've fixed dish washers and washing machines with minimal investment in time and parts. Beats calling a repair guy or worse junking the stuff and getting a new one!
Good appliance parts site:
http://www.partselect.com/
Anything is possible given time and money.
I have recurring ink jet printer and fax machine problems. And thank God Epson et al are continually replacing models with newer incompatible ones that require new ink and often new software installed.
But that's nothing compared to my Sharp fax machine which has got to use the most expensive black ink carts on the planet and they regularly fail or randomly dry out.
If fixing helps those pesky problem than hell yeah.
I have seen so many otherwise workable items about to be thrown out because of a minor, easily fixed issue (sometimes even just needing some superglue!)
I have a collection of about 6 DVD players, a few audio tape players, VCR's, etc that people have handed me when I said "it's probably an easy fix"; their response was "if you can get it working it's yours." Invariably the repair was simple, in the case of the DVD players just needed a lens cleaning (not one of those crappy sale unit lens cleaners, a real opening up and swabbing with some rubbing alcohol).
Basic principles of home electronics:
NOTHING is all that complicated. If it were that complicated, it would cost $20,000 or more. Even a DVD recorder sold 5 years ago for $1000 is still frighteningly similar to the one you got for $30 last week, and probably even easier to trace loose connections and items since it's not been subjected to 5 years of component consolidation and micro-sizing.
VCR repair, DVD repair, most anything else is just a matter of having a few basic tools. Well, that and using the grey matter between your ears. You can tell if there's a broken belt, you can visually tell if a capacitor has blown, you can smell if something has shorted out and you can usually see the scorch. Sometimes it's repairable, sometimes you just learn more about the standard innards (and if you think Company #1's VCR or DVD player is that much different from Company #2's or Company #3's, you're delusional).
You wouldn't believe how many times a "dead" PS2 can be revived just by cleaning the firking lens.
And if you kill it... parent point #2 is dead-on correct. You have nothing to lose opening up something that's long out of warranty and broken; the worst that can happen is that it's still broken when you're done with it.
Of course, when I've mentioned this to some of the people out there, they're terrified of the "warning, voltage" and "warranty void if removed" stickers plastered all over their stuff. We really need to teach people that they can do this stuff safely and without a lot of worry; I'm starting to be convinced most of these "warnings" are just there to scare people into not getting perfectly serviceable products repaired.
..seriously, I've been fixing my stuff and others' since I was 9. Cash registers, toasters, guns, cameras, sheesh, I dunno, it's probably the Yankee in me. I used to save stuff. never know when a power cord would come in handy. Or the strain relief from one. I bought a finished Heathkit color TV and solved the various adjustment and bad solder problems. Cheap TV. And my first three CD players, last two stereo systems, and my Minidisc recorder.
My first 'real' job outside the Air Force was fixing office calculators, dictating machines, typewriters, mimeographs/duplicators, sorters, folders, you name it. I moved up the food chain a bit to IBM stuff like Selectrics, Mag Cards, Electronics, OS/6, and DisplayWriters. And those damned 6:5 things. I finally bought a turbo XT and learned to fix computers.
Now I amaze my wife with little and big things I fix. All except for the digital camera she sat on. But I know which of the 3 little plastic fingers she broke, and if I had them, I could indeed fix it. lately, I've been on a jag fixing anything but iPods, especially those Toshiba Gigabeats. Damn, those are easy to fix.
Yeah, I hate throwing something out just cause it's got a weak battery, or laptops with broken screen hinges, stuff that fails intermittantly just cause of a connection. With a decent selection of soldering irons, good epoxy, small screwdrivers, and patience, you can fix a lot. Sometimes, the hammer works best...
We do need to be less of a throwaway society. But the way consumer electronics are made today, the economics of repair parts is terrible. I dread buying an HDTV, knowing that I probably won't be able to fix much in it. And it won't last 20+years, like that old Heathkit. But hey, the picture makes it all worthwhile, right?
*sniff*
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
Ever since I was a kid I had a fascination with taking things apart just to see what's inside and made them tick (no, not animals!), but I learnt something that most people can't or don't think they can do - put it back together without breaking it or even end up fixing it.
The upside is you can make your gadgets last longer through fixing them or enhance them beyond their original design, for example one of my 2 iRiver H140's is made up from 3 broken units I bought off eBay, it works perfectly and it cost me nothing (but the time to fix it) because I sold most of the leftover bits and another complete working unit back on eBay for what the broken units cost overall.
There is a downside to being able to fix your own gadgets, all your bloody friends at some time or another ask "my xyz stopped working, can you fix it?"
To do something right, you often have to roll up your sleeves and get busy.
I am sure I could play the Ric Romero card right about...now!
Things can be fixed - I'm Shocked - Shocked!
I suppose the truth is though that a major percentage of the consumer brigade won't be soldering iron-wielding, ebay-scavenging, have-a-go types.
I've fixed many an item in the past - I suppose the best to date was an HP laptop where the screen was cracked and I managed to get an identical model with working screen, but duff motherboard, on ebay for £20!
Mind you - the replacement fuser for a Brother HL1540 laser printer is approximately £10 less than the cost of a completely new printer and a broker wanted something like £160 for a 'genuine' replacement PSU for an HP Proliant server (I found a compatible for £25) so there are some clear imbalances in the prices for spare parts - almost as if the manufacturers would prefer things not to be fixed, eh!?
AT&ROFLMAO
Yeah, they can be repaired... it's just not always practical.
My girlfriend's expensive iPod speaker system got its volume stuck at full, and it fell to me to repair it. Actually, her remedy was just to pile pillows on top of it, but we don't really have enough pillows to get a decent volume control range, and it took up a lot of space.
I didn't have too much trouble tracking down the faulty volume control IC, but it helped that I have a workshop with several thousand dollars of test and rework equipment. Honestly, it could have been done with a cheap voltmeter or logic probe and some patience.
I knew exactly what chip to replace, but there are NO distributors of that part in North America. Minimum order from Taiwan was something like 10,000. No equivalents available, either. I managed to talk the company into sending a couple of engineering samples - 'free' parts that only cost me $70 in FedEx charges. (Ah, the things us geeks do for love.) Installing the part was again not a big deal, but only because I have a hot air rework station designed for the task.
Component availability problems can be overcome, but the bigger problem is lack of information. Without at least a schematic it can be very tough to troubleshoot modern electronics, and good luck getting that sort of information out of a manufacturer.
Still, I suppose it's worth pointing out that 3 of the last 4 cellphones used in my house have had their lives extended significantly through repair. 90% of the time the problems there are related to mechanical and interconnect parts - charging connectors, flex cables in hinges, speaker contacts, and so on, and it doesn't take a genius to spot and fix those problems. The last phone I fixed turned out to have a failed connection where some foam had worn out. The fix was to jam a piece of paper in its place.
Forty years ago my dad had a TV and general electronics repair shop, and customers could bring in any random gadget and reasonably expect that there was a good chance he'd be able to fix it, or at least tell them what was wrong with it and why it wasn't worth fixing. Those days are long gone, at least in the realm of consumer electronics. Yeah, you can specialize in XBox repairs, or iPods, or some limited scope like that, and folks like me will make their best attempt at fixing devices for their friends and family, but doing general repairs commercially? Your success rate is going to be too low, and the chances of breaking things further is too great. And the situation is only going to get worse as integration increases. Just wait until all of our electronics are made in 3D fabricators, with each IC die and passive component buried in a solid block of material and no possibility of access to ANY discrete part.
My Sony DVD player kept freezing up and turning off, refusing to even eject the disc. I researched it online and roughly half the posts mentioned the same issue and some had called Sony. I called Sony and they not only denied ever hearing of the problem, and refused to let me send them any information, but they wanted me to pat something like $269 just to LOOK at the player, plus parts, labor and shipping.
Instead, I made a sandwich of multiple layers of tinfoil and silver paste to make the main processor contact the "heat sink" (it's top was originally attached to a frame piece with double-sided sticky tape -- well known for it's long term reliability and heat conduction properties) and it has worked fine since. Of course now I use a $40 divx player, but it's still a good story.
Now if only I could figure out why my Sony receiver randomly crashes and either mutes or blasts noise until I reboot it.
TFA should be entitled, "Today's younger generations are discovering that some stuff can be fixed... if it's the right stuff and I don't have a six figure income." My father was more than happy to pull out a screwdriver and tinker with the record player, and would sometimes spend days tinkering with gadgets to get them to function correctly. Of course, most of the stuff that he used was electromechanical, with components large enough to replace by hand.
Dad often took the time to point out how things worked, because he honestly believed his understanding of "how things work" would be of immense value to me. Unfortunately, it wasn't. I was a child of the 8-bit microprocessor revolution; my childhood environment was filled with mysterious digital circuitry, and no manner of traditional tinkering could repair a blown Commodore 6581 SID chip. Things have gotten worse with time: The introduction of surface-mount components and multi-function chipsets means that there are genuinely few "user serviceable" parts inside consumer goods.
Millions of PDAs, handheld computers, digital cameras, phones and mp3 players flooded the marketplace in the 1990s. It didn't make sense to try to fix them if they broke, because something 10x better was always just around the corner. Fast forward a decade, and the rate of development has slowed. My 3-year-old iPod is like an old friend, and it's technically "good enough" for everyday use. If the battery or screen needs replacing, it's worth it (from an economic and time standpoint).
Unfortunately, lots of modern tech gear isn't designed to be fixed. It's designed to be cheap to produce. That translates to mp3 players with shoddy connectors that pop of the circuit board, or DVD playback mechanisms with poor quality plastic drive gears. Thist stuff can be fixed, but it's usually more trouble than its worth. As far as electronic repairs go, the easiest solution is often a board swap, because replacing SMD parts requires considerable skill and patience in addition to excellent troubleshooting skills. All is not lost, though -- things will change quickly if the economy continues to nosedive, for the simple reason that asian-made electronics will cost more to purchase and real incomes in the US will drop. Paradoxically, poverty breeds creativity and determination for geeks.
This would sound a bit crazy to most people, but here is probably one of the few crowds where it might not be.
My teenage son regularly tours around the neighborhood on "garbage night" looking for old computers left at the curb for pickup. The safety aspect in your neighborhood may vary greatly! Anyway, by frankensteining his discoveries over the last year, he now has a nice P4 system that's more than capable of running older games such at UT2003. Almost the whole system was put together from "junk" parts for free. It is very common for only one component of a "dead" system to be bad, and the rest of the pieces to be fine. He's also revived old PIII and AMD systems that are perfectly acceptable as word processing/e-mail/web browsing systems and given them to friends or sold them for $20. Some of the more unusual prizes were a 1600x1024 SGI LCD display (still have to find an adapter, though), a Sun SPARC workstation, and an original IBM PC with monitor (a valuable antique these days). With a soldering iron and a careful examination for cold solder joints, he's also fixed half a dozen "broken" CRT monitors. Don't be alarmed -- he and I know about discharging capacitors first.
He's now progressed to fixing DVD players and stereos, and thanks to some soldering skill, he has a fairly complete AV system with tuner, amp, CD/DVD and speakers -- again, for free. The damn thing sounds better than *my* stereo. As he finds better pieces he replaces the component and either gives the old one to a friend or puts it back out on the curb, sometimes to disappear before morning because someone else is probably doing the same thing and picks it up.
As several people have mentioned, the only downside to trying to fix broken items is a bit of time and effort, and sometimes you do need to know a bit about electronics safety.
While we're on the subject of repairing gadgets, hopefully someone will know the answer to this. I have a Mac G4 Powerbook that has gotten into the habit of displaying vertical stripes of color on the screen. For instance, one whole column of cyan pixels might light up, or pink... It's in the same general part of the screen, but not always the same pixels, they might flicker and be fine for a while, or I might have two color stripes instead of one.
Anyone know if this could be something as simple as a loose connector to the display that I could potentially fix, or is the LCD going bad, or maybe the video adapter getting flaky?
When my iPod mini went tits up, I tried a few things but they didn't work. So in the end I decided to take it apart for shits and giggles. Lo and behold, I found a funny looking drive inside. Funny looking, but also familiar looking. And lo and behold, it turned out that it could be stuck into a compact flash reader. So a trip to the local computer store later, I had a odd looking 4GB drive that I could stick into the back of my 360 and use it to play my albums off.
Yeah, I've never understood why more folks don't repair their own appliances. For instance, Whirlpool has been using the exact same basic design for their top load washers for about thirty years. All the major parts are accessible without even moving the washer away from the wall. In addition there are very few parts in the entire machine that are cost-prohibitive to replace compared to the cost of a new machine. Complete parts lists and exploded diagrams are at the Sears website for free. To top it off, you can purchase the service manual (geared towards DIY's) for about fifteen bucks. Same thing goes with most American-brand dryers, dishwashers, ranges and refrigerators. (Although no DIY is going to be able to fix a sealed-system problem with their fridge.)
This is not so much the case for the fancy imported brands from Europe or Korea... You may be able to get parts, but service manuals will be tougher to find.
SirWired
in fact we're going to hell because of consumerism / corporatism
companies should be forced to build durable products instead of rip offs
Sell your broken junk on E-Bay or Craigslist. As previous posters have pointed out, it's very difficult to find parts for today's modern day electronics, and buying a broken device on the cheap is better than paying expensive shipping costs to get a replacement piece of plastic from Taiwan.
We've become a nation of people who believe in disposable everything. And the companies who sell goods LOVE IT. There is nothing my current cell phone does that my old pea-green LCD screen phone from from 1997 couldn't do. (You TALK in it, you LISTEN, you dial numbers. That's all we need!) But no, we must have the latest gadgetry to keep up with the Jones.
It truly disgusts me sometimes... and then other times, I fall into the trap of "wanting things" too. (sigh*
This may be old hat for many here, but always check for swollen capacitors before tossing electronics of any meaningful worth. I recently fixed my broken DLP HDTV for a couple of bucks.
The reason why people are suddenly more interested in the possibility of fixing their gadgets instead of throwing away old/broken items and buying new stuff is because the economy is tanking big-time right now.
The high rising price of gasoline is one of the biggest key factors. Next is the rising basic cost of living. All around me I know people who now can barely afford to buy food plus pay the rent/mortgage plus pay their utilities after filling up their cars every week so they can drive to work. Buying new clothes or new gadgets? Ha, they wish they could, but just can't anymore. Luxury stuff like cable TV, and a landline plus cellphone went away for them a few months ago. Their $14.95/month basic DSL internet line will have to go by January, and they'll just do without internet, or go to the public library.
Salaries / wages are not keeping up with inflation and increased cost of living either.
The higher-paid technogeeks like me aren't hurting nearly as much, but some of the people I know can no longer make ends meet and it's starting to get ugly among the blue collar working stiffs out there.
No wonder people are fixing stuff instead of buying new stuff lately.
Duh.
Go ahead and mod me down as flamebait. I'm angry as hell right now and need to vent.
One of my blue collar buddies, who's brother just got blown up in Iraq last week, is having to charge his trip to Arlington Cemetery to attend the funeral on his almost maxed-out credit card (maxed out due to unexpected medical expenses for his kids, not because of bad spending habits), since the military offered him a "discounted" military/bereavement airline ticket at nearly $600 when he was able to find his own on Expedia for only $350. I offered to buy his ticket and hotel but he is too proud and refused to accept. Me and the rest of his friends will gang up on him when he returns and we'll fill his kitchen full of groceries for a couple months or something that he won't be able to refuse to help him out.
I'll give you a great example of what's bleeding non-corp types dry: Health Insurance.
If you're keeping yourself insured and don't have a nice big company backing you, it's EXPENSIVE.
As an example, I've got about 220 dollars per month in combined gas/insurance costs.
Health insurance for that same period is 278 dollars/mo, and getting dropped end of this month.
Combine that with minimum wage, and well you can see why I wouldn't be living on my own.
Only other option is to sell out and pick a 'career' job, assuming you can find somewhere that'll hire you on full-time, and provide health care benefits (last job wouldn't either way, and given that it paid a buck and a half less than my prior job, it wasn't worth it!)
There's also the problem of difference between generations of hardware.
Most of the gadgets we have today started appearing during the late 90s / early 00s.
Back at the beginning, after a year or two, technology had moved a lot and the previous gadget was completely deprecated.
Either because characteristics went up 1000%, making it more usable.
Or the technology to exchange data with it has changed making the old one useless (proprietary connector to parallel port to serial port).
Or the technology used by the gadget it self was replaced by something new and completely different (jump from audio tapes to minidiscs and/or CDs for example).
On the other hand, most recent gadget give little incentive to buy newer : most of the time what you have is "good enough", and the newer gadget are very expensive for only marginally more interesting characteristics.
Why buy a new article for several hundreds of dollars when the previous one is good enough and could be fixed just by replacing the battery for a couple of dozens of dollars.
This can also be seen by looking at the marketing trends : today a lot of gadgets are sold like fashion trends. emphasis is more but on the visual aspect than on the technical specs.
A lot of gadget are mainly bought for the cool factor.
And that's something that can backfire at the company making the gadgets : you spent a lot of PR budget to make people things that gadget X was the coolest thing to have. You did success. A lot of people felt attracted and bought your stuff. Now you have to persuade them that they're wrong, gadget X isn't cool anymore, gadget X+1 "is the new cool". And that will be much harder, because people still like a lot their old gadget and don't really see new incentive for the new one. They'll be harder to fool again to persuade them to buy a new iteration of the same stuff with just a newer shell painted in a different color.
The phone market is the only that managed to keep selling new fashion each season, mainly because of sponsored situation were one gets basically a phone for free with each contract with a carrier. Thus the upgrade comes at no (directly apparent) cost, and the users are much more likely to accept a change for purely cosmetic reasons.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Generally speaking, it takes more labor to build a device than it does to fix it. Therefore, one would think, it would be cheaper to fix than to replace a broken device. But when device-construction labor is done halfway across the globe by slave laborers, and device-repair work is done by locals who have to pay the same cost of living that the device's owner does, then that assumption breaks down.
It's a distortion of the market brought on by capital being far more mobile than labor, that's all.
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
Component level repair can be done on tons of stuff. What is especially helpful is that other people who have repaired things are often willing to share the information on specific repairs on the Internet. When one of our employee's dryer croaked, I was able to do a component level repair on the board that controlled the machine. Nothing really terrible had happened to the logic on the board, all that had happened was that the poorly designed power supply regulation system had failed. After reading the many tales of dead dryers and poor service on that thread, it makes me think it's worth taking a look at most problems before calling someone. Some problems can be solved easily too. I had a problem where our dishwasher wouldn't drain properly. As it turned out, the soap tablets we had been using needed hotter water to dissolve properly and it had gummed up the drainage valve. By cranking up the water temperature and running it a bit I managed to clear the issue up without having to remove the dishwasher. It's worth checking on the internet before attempting to repair things. I suppose it's also worth checking before you buy the thing in the first place.
==
Mass integration is part of the ordeal. But from a design point of view, manufacturers sure don't seem to want people to fix things either.
For example, the rechargeable battery on my Norelco cordless electric razor gave out not too long ago. I looked online and found a few dealers selling replacement battery packs. I assumed that the battery swap would be very simple, involving nothing more than removing a few screws, pulling apart the casing, and swapping the battery pack with a new one.
When I opened the shaver, I found out that the battery pack was soldered onto a circuit board. I had to unscrew four more screws, wedge away a small daughter board, pull the remaining parts out of the bottom-half of the casing, the entire time delicately handling the motor (which was connected to the circuit board via two thin copper ribbon wires) as I de-soldered the old battery pack and soldered the new one.
If the device was intended to be repairable, they would've just included a removable battery pack.
How I temporarily fixed the flickering screen of my Thinkpad.
Yes, that is indeed a pen cap you see sticking out of the laptop. It worked long enough for me to finish the paper.
"Anyone who [rips a CD] is probably engaging in copyright infringement." - David O. Carson
Although i prefer logitech, microsoft has a damn fine hardware department. Every keyboard, mouse and speaker in the house (aside from the home entertainment system) and remote control in the house is logitech, but my main pointing device, the place where my hand spends 90% of the time when im at the computer is a Microsoft Trackball Explorer, best thing i've ever owned. Wish they still made them, id buy a case of them. Granted i dont use it for FPS, have a logitech mx-518, but my trackball for everything else. I had a Model M keyboard, but it died on me thanks to a spilled drink, tried cleaning it, but to no avail. I'm using a logitech G15 for my main keyboard now.
"Sic Semper Tyrannosaurus Rex."
Anyone else notice how over half the references to broken products belong apple. Reminds me of this old video http://youtube.com/watch?v=xiAgrrwL_mk "On a mac, you just pick it up, throw it away, and go buy a new one"
My parents can remember the great depression and my father is handy w/ things. The assumption when I was growing up was that you always fix things and keep them going, and if you see something thrown away grab it and fix that too. At worst you figure out how the thing works and have spares for other units. It kept us in cars, TVs etc when times were tough.
I've never lost that habit, and generally build my own stuff (computers, projectors, telescopes, motion stages, CNC machines) so when they break it's just putting things back together. I've never driven but I can tear a car down to it's component parts and put it back together.
Not only does this save me money, but it makes me the company MacGuyver.
The other component for this resurgence is eBay serving as a ready source of spares and repairable goods.
These guys seem to make the equivalent (buckling spring tech, etc...).
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
Get an IDE drive fitted to it via the network adapter and use HDLoader. My PS2 hasn't had to read more than 10bytes off a disc in years.
I offered to buy his ticket and hotel but he is too proud and refused to accept. Me and the rest of his friends will gang up on him when he returns and we'll fill his kitchen full of groceries for a couple months or something that he won't be able to refuse to help him out.
Amen.
I wish I had some mod points tonight.
Somebody please mod this A/C's story up. It needs to be seen.
On Christmas day, my 3+ year old powerbook G4 met my mother-in-law's cat. Upon meeting, the cat evacuated on the keyboard. Flash forward 3 hours when I discovered that my powered laptop was dripping yellow. Powered electronics + ionic solution equal crusties everywhere. The backlight was out, but I could still see OS X on the LCD. I get back home and take the machine apart. With my trusty bottle of alcohol and cotton swabs, I start cleaning off the crusties. I could not save the inverter card but with a CFL placed behind the stripped LCD I found that the rest of the computer still functioned normally. While waiting for my card to arrive I had the wireless antenna drag across the main board while the laptop was powered. Flash, Pow, Smoke. Looked like a surface mount diode exploded. The diodes purpose? It was part of the battery charging circuitry. So I now had a laptop that could not charge, and requires a CFL placed behind the screen. For a week I toted this frankenstein machine to law school. Professors perplexed with a bare light bulb propped up in class. I figured out the part I blew by matching the writing that had survived the explosion with that of other diodes on the board. Then I searched google for those markers, and found the part for sale from Digikey. I ordered 5 parts for $0.50 + $8 shipping and handling. 5 because I knew I would probably lose one, burn one, and didn't want to be left with the perverbial 1 match in the matchbox scenario. Besides the main expense was shipping, not the $0.09 for the part. I did lose the first one. Once received, I soldered this tiny diode, received the backlight inverter board from Ebay, put it all together and finished the semester. I still can't believe that I fixed that thing. It was awesome.
I just revived two 4th gen iPods with "dead" hard drives. It seems that the firmware in the iPods can't perform sector reallocation if a sector goes bad. The iTunes software won't re-init the drives in that case, and getting the drives into disk mode to diagnostics may not be possible.
/dev/zero to the drive until full. After that, iTunes was able to re-init the drives. They've been working fine ever since (fully loaded). The first time I thought it was just a lucky coincidence. When the process worked a second time, it seemed downright odd.
What I found is that if I connect the Firewire cable to an un-powered connector (6-pin unpowered, like a daisy chain, or via a 4 to 6 pin adapter), I can get the drive into disk mode. It must take a different path through the firmware in that case.
Once in disk mode, I used dd_rescue (retry forever) on Linux to copy
Why would Apple not have proper sectore reallocation software, especially in a mobile device? It's not like their customers would just buy another, or pay an (expensive) out of warranty repair. Oh, wait...
Can You Say Linux? I Knew That You Could.
machines can be fixed, because they have less disposable income now than they used to, and their technotoys cost more than they used to. That tends to make people think twice about simply throwing an expensive gadget away.
... those that are re-learning the art of pinching pennies will look for alternatives.
No real mystery here. People that can afford to toss costly electronics into the dumpster usually will
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
Yeah maybe for someone who doesn't know how to download music from the internets. Who buys all these 80GB ipods? and the 160's? and the 16GB touch? If your 10gb ipod hard drive dies, it's probably time to go solid state and buy an 8GB nano (200 bucks) because before you know it you'll be replacing the battery too. Maybe I'm the only one who feels this way, but I think that the 10gb ipod is more of an example of something that you would be insane to try to (or pay to)repair.
The owner's manual for most pieces of stereo equipment used to have a schematic diagram at the very least, and perhaps a detailed "theory of operation" description and parts list. Nowadays, you don't even get that level of detail in the factory SERVICE manual that you have to pay $40 to get!
:)
At least into the '80s, GE television sets used to have a condensed service manual (schematic and alignment instructions) stashed in a small compartment on the back of the set. Unfortunately, GE sets were some of the least reliable on the market at the time, so that service data was the least the factory could do to apologize for them.
About the only products that still seem to include wiring diagrams nowadays are major appliances. Washers and dryers usually have a large diagram pasted inside the back cover.
Remember "News for Nerds, Stuff that Matters"? Help make it a reality again! http://soylentnews.org
Constructability, operability, maintainability.
ANY product or system which is designed WITHOUT those three things in mind as being EQUAL importance is not going to be on my list of approved products, and I have spent a significant portion of my adult life gainfully employed writing specifications for equipment for everything from public outhouse solar powered lighting equipment to commercial nuclear power plant reactor safe-shutdown systems.
If I can not work on it myself, or determine from the manuals and drawings how to write instructions for someone else to work on it, (for which I am presently gainfully employed to do) I will not recommend it's purchase. I have refused my approval more than once to a purchase for a client because the vendor and manufacturer would NOT provide "tear-down" drawings and parts lists. Usually the manufacturer's do not want to supply the information because it points out how badly implemented their designs are to begin with.
Just because it is the lowest purchase price does NOT equal the best overall quality, and I am beginning to see some of those in my profession, equally proud to call themselves geeks, waking up to that fact.
[Damn right I'm posting anonymous. Too many hothead vendor and manufacturer reps out there.]
I agree. And the frightening thing is that those sorts of stories are starting to become more common. It's really starting to look like the economic problems we had in the 80s all over again.
Everything I need to know I learned by killing smart people and eating their brains.
Due to the original IBM PC architecture, it was easy to make your computer run better - some simple screws, plug-in cards, simple electrical connections.
You give IBM too much credit. The Apple II came in a pop-open case with no screws, and included full electrical schematics.
And before that, there were customizable, upgradable kits.
Sheesh. Kids these days think IBM invented the moon.
I'll get my revenge, though. Someday, you'll be reading Slashdot, and you'll see some youn'un give Dell all the credit. "Due to the build-to-order philosophy that Dell fostered, people have become comfortable tinkering with their hardware. Before point-and-click customizing, neanderthalls just stared blankly at their PCs, with no concept of what was inside."
You'll see.
The US free market: two halves of a government-granted duopoly are free to set the market price.
The military doesn't obtain tickets for family members to attend funerals.
I know that the US Air Force will assist with making arrangements for getting priority airline tickets, and will reimburse immediate next of kin (spouse, dependent children, or parents if not married, and not siblings either) travel expenses after the funeral, but the next-of-kin much purchase the tickets themselves up front. The original A/C never said the military (whatever branch, he didn't say) was buying his friend's ticket, only that they "offered", which sounds like they were just making bereavement flight arrangements only, which is consistent with what I learned when one of my friends who was in the USAF got killed in a plane crash several years ago, and the USAF issued a reimbursement voucher for his ex-wife and son's airline tickets to fly to Washington for the funeral.
I'll give you a great example of what's bleeding non-corp types dry: Health Insurance.
Even the corporate types are feeling that crunch too. Even though my employer has a group policy, and I am fortunate to have that, but all us employees still pay for a big chunk of it out of each paycheck. I just got a cost of living raise, and will only get to enjoy it for November and December, then come January 1st, the premiums will go up so much that my payroll deduction that pays for my portion of the health insurance will completely gobble up that raise. Oh, well... it was a "cost of living" raise after all, not a real raise.
These guys are better since they will ship anywhere http://www.appliance411.com/parts/partslists.shtml
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
I personally see it as almost immoral, given the current state of things, to throw out a huge appliance that barely gets used anyway and buy a new one because it needs a simple fix.
The idea of repairing something almost offends them. I was staying at their house and their dishwasher quit, it was 2 years old but out of warranty. They were going to buy a new one and were bitching about it, I hired a guy to replace a faulty switch for $100 and my sister acted like it was a strange novelty. She had to hide the fact it had been repaired from her husband, he'd be pissed.
I have the same attitude as my dad, the sort of environmentalism of the depression era - waste not, want not. Simple as that. I don't keep garbage, but unlike my sister and brother-in-law I don't buy a new PC every six months rather than just keeping it clean of malware, putting in a new HD, memory, etc.
Part of that is because I have to live off of disability... but still, these people who are consumer droids buying a new cell phone for every kid in the household every six months... that's just fucked up.
This space available.
Got mine off ThinkGeek a few years ago, but I wouldn't dream of using it for putting things back together, it gets used for tinning wires, taking LEDs out of hubs and things like that. In no way is it a precision tool.
Do not meddle in the affairs of geeks for they are subtle and quick to anger
I've spent a modest amount of money during the last few years buying (faulty, repair) items from eBay, and fixing them. Though I know I am in healthy auctioning competition with many other individuals for this or that kind of device, I have had some really good wins; synthesiser keyboards, rack mounted music effects units, big valve PA amps, test equipment (I collect HP), home cinema audio; schematics can be tough to find, but the former Soviet Union is excellent hunting ground, and a PDF for all kinds of obscure devices can be downloaded for just a few bucks. Recently my wife struck a very good bargain for a mobility scooter for herself - unaffordable at new or pre-owned prices, but with the magic word Faulty on the eBay listing, got it for a song. Turned out to be a crack in a pcb due to damp ingress. (Did you know that mobility scooters use PIC microcontrollers?) She is now whirring round our home town at 5mph happy as a pig in poo, and I am delighted that she is mobile at an affordable price.
First of all-I'd say this is great. I used to read about American consumers throwing away old appliances in landfills while growing up, and found it rather incredible. India has had a 'recycle' culture long before it became fashionable in the 90s. In earlier times (about 20 years ago; I was a kid then) nearly everything sold in shops would come in brown paper bags rather than plastic bags. We still continue to use glass bottles for soft drinks; though cans are available they've not caught on as much.
And speaking of repairing appliances-nearly every neighborhood would have standard repair shop for everything-electrical appliances,watches,auto parts and so on. Getting things fixed as described by others here, was quite a common phenomenon. Indians have had to be thrifty for years, under the closed economy that lasted till 1991 we had very little choice by way of variety and quality with products; so learnt to make do with what was there.
At home, for years we would store spices and condiments in old jam bottles. When I was a kid, you could get these rubber snap on bottlecaps to fix on glass bottles of fruit juice; so that they could be reused for drinking water. Bread would be sold wrapped in waxed paper, rather than sealed plastic that's prevalent today.
And speaking of computer hardware-there are still service shops where you can find antique Pentium II motherboards, old IBM EGA monitors and even 5 1/4" floppy drives being fixed! Similarly, there's a huge market for used mobile phones; you can get a very basic Nokia 3300 (discontinued now) for below $20.
Sadly today India's headed the same way. After sales service is a joke with most white goods manufacturers, and planned obsolescence is the way to go.
If the worlds' largest energy consumer decides to cut down on consumption in this manner, it can only benefit everybody and the environment.
"..One hosts to look them up, one DNS to find them, and in the darkness BIND them."
a while ago now, the user manual for a colour Epsom/HP printer (forget which now) had enough information for someone at work to make a working Dev VAX driver for the device.
Now? "Insert CD and follow the instructions. If it doesn't play, click on the CD and select "Autoplay"" is all you get.
How about instead of purchasing an iPod with a hard drive, how about purchasing one that is solid state and supports microSD. Then you can still get your same 10GB of music except you can swap the disks in and out and still have 8GB in the core device. It will probably last twenty years, and you don't have to deal with software that was written by someone at Apphole.
A former co-worker told me once that a water heater company his dad had dealings with used to make the best, most durable water heaters available. He had one in his house that had been around for some 30-40 years, and still worked as well as it did when new. The manufacturer went out of business, because it never got any repeat business. It seems that the companies that make water heaters designed to last 10 years or so did much better, because when one of theirs would wear out, they'd get to sell a replacement for it.
:)
Selling merchandise designed to break down is more profitable than selling quality merchandise, and in our society, profitability is what drives most business decisions. You might be able to make some money by selling slightly better quality stuff, but if you go too far, you stand to lose out on the repeat business that corporations crave.
People are a problem....
-Mike
I'm sorry; I don't know what I was thinking!
This is a great idea. I have a great stereo I got for my bday 10 years ago. It's a Samsung (if I remember correctly) and it has a 5 CD carousel on the top, a radio and 2 tape decks. It also has a video in connection so I hooked it up to my dvd player and tv for stereo sound.
Anyway, I love it. But for the last 5 years, every time I turn it off, it loses all preset radio stations and goes back to factory default. When I turn it on the CD tray spins and everything programmed in is gone. It's putting extra wear and tear on the CD tray and is just frustrating. I opened it up one time and took a clueless peak in side to see if I could spot anything that looks like a battery for maintaining the memory but couldn't spot anything.
I'd be so grateful if I could get that problem fixed. When I get home and can check the model info I'll be hitting up that fixya site for sure. Great idea for a website.
I just fixed a leaking tub on our washing machine with some JB Weld. Earlier this year I patched a hole in my motorcycle crankcase with JB Weld. It's better than duct tape!
High dollar items are worlth fixing. For Mp3 players and digcameras, it's typically not worth it. You can buy a new one for the same price and get a better version, or buy a cheaper version with the same functionality of the one that broke. Although, I must admit that on more than a few occasions I spent some time fixing broken electronics that I should have replaced. I only did this because I had the extra time to spare, and I was curious about the inner workings. However, most electronics repair companies in my city are closing down, b/c everyone is buying new to replace the broken.
I had a PowerBook, and four of the keys stopped working. I'm not a hardware kind of guy, but I figured that it must be the keyboard, right? Now, I'm in the UK, and you can't buy Apple parts here, so I sent off to the USA for a keyboard. I put it in, and for about a minute the keys work - and then they don't again. I'm kicking myself for my naivety in thinking I could fix it myself, and I'm £80 down.
/real/ Apple place, unfortunately). I have to wait nearly an hour after the advertised opening time for them to appear. I tell them that I replaced they keyboard already, that it looked like it was going to work and then stopped. I tell them that it's out of warranty, and yes I know that I'll have to give them £70 just to turn it on.
/on/ for a bit; perhaps the heat is affecting it. Sure says the guy, I'll leave it to cool and try again, no worries. Feeling that this conversation had gone as far as it could, I let it go. He phoned an our later to tell me that it still worked. With heavy heart that weekend, I went to pick it up. The guy in the shop did not show me it working, and when I went for coffee and tried to check it, there was no charge in the battery. So I get it home, turned it on, and after a minute... you see where I'm going with this, right?
So I decide to take it to the professionals, and go to an Apple shop in Cheltenham (a franchise, not a
Three days later I get a call from the engineer, who tells me it's out of warranty. Yes, I know, I say. By now I've noticed that the shop droid did not write down all that I told him about my attempted repair (hell, he didn't even get my name right), so I repeat this to the engineer (who was most snotty about my getting my own part myself).
A week later I get a call saying that they swapped the keyboard out and it worked on a different machine, and that they put a new keyboard on my machine and it worked, and that they put my keyboard back on my machine and it worked. Thinking that this was unlikely but not impossible, I asked him to confirm that he had left it running for a minute. He said that he would leave it off to cool down and try again for me. Well, no I said, I think it needs to be left
Well, the only good thing that came out of this was that he mentioned that he had not tried the 'topcase'. So I do a bit of investigation, and see that there is a ribbon cable from the keyboard to the topcase, and then another from the topcase to the logic board. If the logic board needs replacing, I may as well buy a new PowerBook (or whatever they are called now). But if it's the topcase, it is economically viable to fix it.
So I have a few tight-lipped conversations with the 'Apple' shop and get my £70 quid back. I go onto eBay, and someone is selling a topcase for my model, which I get for £40. If it works, I have a fixed laptop; if not, I have diagnosed as much as I need for less than the 'professionals' were charging. And the news is all good - it works, and I have done what the pro's could not.
Frankly, I don't know whether to feel self-satisfied or cross.
And by the way, this story was brought to you by Western Computers, in Cheltenham and Bristol. Avoid.
What luck for rulers that men do not think. - Adolf Hitler
...pretty soon it starts looking like a hammer.
My Commodore Amiga 1000 and 2000 came with full schematics, in 1986-89, respectively. Ditto my HP Thinkjet printer from the same period, plus part numbers and ordering information for where to get every IC.
Last night I was working on an HP function generator from the same period. The individual circuit boards have silkscreen notations telling what different functional groups of circuits do: one section will be circled in white with "GPIB controller" written within it, and adjacent to that, another group with "GPIB controller clock" labelled. Sure makes it easy to figure out where the frequency calibration gain stage is.
I learned something interesting from an ex-boss, when I was working at a place that made circuitry. We had a tour of customers and we had to cover up the manufacturer nameplates on some of the machines, because we were afraid our customers would see those and be able to just go straight to the source and duplicate our efforts. My boss said "when you have to hide what you're doing, you're no longer innovating: we need to start looking for another job." I think that goes straight to the source of the amazing vanishing schematics: back when HP and Commodore were doing brilliant things, they could open-source their hardware because by the time it was copied, they would've already moved on to something even better and wouldn't care. These days, the manufacturing cycles have become so rapid and the amount of hardware innovation has dropped enough that people have to keep their hardware designs obfusticated (yeah, it's a word, no it's not in the dictionary) to stay competitive. That, coupled with an urge to cut costs anywhere possible, leads to removing schematics and any way of getting repair information, which could be used to duplicate the item.
Nostalgia's not what it used to be.
I doubt they made it to be a precision tool. Like I said, it's nice for light work.
Extreme precision isn't always needed. Sometimes you just need a quick, working fix. It may be unpopular to say here, but sometimes the bubblegum and paperclip solution is the correct one.
Everything I need to know I learned by killing smart people and eating their brains.
Years ago my wife's Panasonic 13" tv died. It started to 'smoke' and then went black.
Normally not worth fixing, but she liked the set. So I opened it up and discovered a
fried flyback transformer. Just so happened that a local parts outlet listed a replacement
on their website in a cross reference to the orig. part number. And it was cheap. So
I picked up a new part and installed it (simple unsolder/solder job on the main pc board).
This didn't fix the set, but I then noticed a burnt out power resistor. Tracing the circuit
it also showed me a suspect horizontal output transistor as well. So I went back to the
jober and got a replacement power resistor and transistor for a few bucks more.
I installed these parts and the tv came back to life. Next I had to re-adjust the crt
setup pots and align the color convergence. These I did by eye (ok, I ALSO ordered a service
manual for the set, which it being a major brand was available).
Total out of pocket cost for parts and the manual was under $50. "My Hero" look in wife's eyes
was priceless. We still have that tv today, and it still works fine.
There's that word again; "heavy". Why are things so heavy in the future? Is there a problem with the earth's gravitational pull?
They ARE out to get you simply because They are in it for themselves and they don't care about you.
$278 a month? I'd kill for insurance at those rates. When I was unemployed about a year back, I was paying well over $400 / mo. for lousy insurance through my ex-employer's COBRA plan. For reference, that was more than I was paying in rent + gas + vehicle insurance. One of the main reasons I came on as a full-time employee at my current job instead of as a contractor is so that I could go on the employee health plan. Sure, it takes a chunk out of my paycheck, but it's a hell of a lot less than self-paying for everything. You just can't buy insurance at the rates the employee plans can negotiate. The whole system is rigged against individuals. The only thing more expensive than paying for individual insurance is not having insurance. Either way you can go broke very, very quickly.
So yeah, buying new toys was right out. Fixing them is the much more economical solution. As the old saying goes, "Use it up, wear it out, make it do, or do without."
-- Flaw
That's because my family dropped Cobra and went to individual plans :P We actually got better rates HMO direct X.X
My Current Printer is about 15 years old. The one before that 20
Old HP Laserjet printers are amazing and absolutely repairable. It's a shame that more stuff these days are built as solidly as those were. Toner still costs a pretty penny, but then I guess that's why there were build so well, so you'll keep coming back for more.