🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <9301217343@ritz.mordor.com> ritz@ritz.mordor.com (Christopher Mauritz) writes:
>Warwick Allison (warwick@cs.uq.oz.au) wrote:
>OS/2> craig@yonder.equinox.gen.nz (Craig Shore) writes:
>OS/2> >Warwick Allison writes:
>OS/2> 
>OS/2> >>In my experience, cheap PC-clones are flaky.  You STILL get what you pay
>OS/2> >>for, even with the low prices of The Clones.
>OS/2> 
>OS/2> 
>OS/2> But with computers, a flakey component can work PERFECTLY for any amount
>OS/2> of time then DING - suddenly a chip pops out of its socket (ok, easy
>OS/2> to fix).  Or a dry joint finally develops just under the spacebar that
>OS/2> you bash everytime you fire a smart-bomb.
>OS/2> 
>
>I really wish you would lay off the complete misinformation.  Any
>electrical engineering major (I was one for 3 years) will tell you
>that over 90% of the time if an electronic component is bad it
>will fail quickly.  That is why most reasonable manufacturers these
>days ('cept Atari...but they're not reasonable) will burn in the
>machine for 72 hours or so.
>

Tell that to an ancient computer running a spectrometer in our lab.
Recently, it started behaving eratically (i.e. computes wrong numbers!)
When we called the manufacturer, they suggested we pull out the cpu card
and reseat all the socketed chips.  It worked!  We've had to do this
twice now.  My guess is that it's due to oxidation on the contacts of cheap 
sockets.  Anyway, the moral is that
although what you say is true for semiconductors, it is not always true
for the conductors (mechanical conections).

This thread about cheap PC clones is interesting.  I remember when I bought
my brand new 1040STf years ago that the first one didn't work right.  The
dealer then suggested I give it the twist (grab each end and twist) which
he found works most of the time to seat some socketed chips inside.  At the
time, there were complaints here in this newsgroup about Atari using cheap
sockets.  Back then, Warwick's statement was being made in flame wars by
PC clone and Macintosh advocates about the Atari ST.

Marcelino Bernardo
mbernar@erenj.com