[dba-Tech] Repairing the Surface Pro

Hi Jim

You are just getting old and sentimental.

But I feel exactly the same way. One reason is that in my young days I and
my two partners constructed and produced a lot of audio gear and later
audio-visual control equipment from the ground up, so I have a very good
feeling of "what's inside" electronic items. 
But that was before ICs and surface mounted components on multi-layer PCBs,
at the most we had dual-layered PCBs. ICs arrived and at some stage such
were capable of handling audio at the studio level. This slowly turned you
from an electronic engineer to a "component assembler". I remember the first
hybrid power-amps and one of the main objections: these were not
serviceable; "burnt out" was an unrecoverable state you only could handle by
replacement.

Side note: If you have had any connection to the AV pr multi-media business
of the 80s, you will know what AVL was. We managed to fully automate an
installation of slide and movie projectors controlled by AVL's QD3, Dove,
and Raven units, and we sold a lot of these to the larger corporations.

Today everything is digitized, DSPs are all over - even the power amps may
be running in class D. Nothing to tune in a DAB radio. If it breaks, that's
it. Think about your smartphone as a component. Except for some interface
components and connectors, there is nothing to repair at reasonable efforts.

/gustav

-----Oprindelig meddelelse-----
Fra: dba-tech-bounces at databaseadvisors.com
[mailto:dba-tech-bounces at databaseadvisors.com] På vegne af Jim Lawrence
Sendt: 24. februar 2013 17:47
Til: 'Discussion of Hardware and Software issues'
Emne: Re: [dba-Tech] Repairing the Surface Pro

Hi Hans:

This is all in theory of course as I have never had to repair a cell phone.
Being that they have always been under contract, the provider owns the phone
until the end of the contract, parts are not easily available to the general
public, there are no moving parts so your phone is unlikely to break and the
only things that can be exchanged (or repaired) are as you say the SIM card
and battery.

Laptops are different though but the bottom end ones are so cheap that the
parts are as expensive as a new unit.

It is that I have a fundamental dislike for just throwing things out that
are still working fine or need simple repairs and are capable of doing just
what you need. 

I am in the process of upgrading an old server (also an old PC), probably in
two to three weeks, that in less than twelve months, will be 15 years old.
Considering that it has basically ran 24x7 for the entire duration, its not
bad (It wasn't even running Linux only an early edition of Win2000 (1998)
first and is now currently running Server2003 enterprise edition). Then
there is a very old PC, running with junk parts from the 90s and can still
run as a server if necessary... Debian Linux I believe. ;-) I have also kept
many client computers running for as long as ten years and then there is the
record, last year, when a client brought in a running Dell (from the time
when they still made real computers), with all the original parts and the
label on the back that read 1990. I have asked the fellow to give the box to
me instead of chucking it out as I would love to try and stuff an
over-clocked server into that box...a friend has access to a two year old
ASUS G74SX laptop mother board with a i7-Intel CPU (6 core), 8GB of RAM...
;-) 

Jim