I remember

[Gary]

When doing Video recorder repairs.

Customer. ' It can't be anything serious it just happened.' or Customer 'It can't be anything serious, it been happening for weeks'.

or 'My heads have gone. it has chewed a tape!' or 'It wont rewind, it must be the heads'.

TV repairs

'The sound has gone off is it the TUBE?'

Customer. ' It can't be anything serious it just happened.' or Customer 'It can't be anything serious, it been happening for weeks'.

or the really annoying

'It just goes ** insert fault here** , like it is now, but if you hit it it works perfectly for 3 weeks. Look!' BASH.

Gary

[Phil]

I remember ... the guy who insisted on sending his c64 in for a 'service' once a year. We drew lots for that one. He smoked a pipe (lots).

The service included rinsing the PCB in Amberclens then Ambersil & emptying the ash from the casing!

Phil.

[Brian Gaff]

Those sort of faults still occur. A friend of mine bought a new Sony TV, which will go into menus and change things without any help from a person, or drain all the colour out of a picture or turn the sound down. In the end they gave up and gave her a new one. Mumbling something about there must be a dodgy chip somewhere.. However, hit it and its fine for the rest of the evening.

Brian

[Phil L]

I agree, not being electronically minded, I often go for the 'give it a good hiding' approach

[Brian Gaff]

I think surface mounted components have actually made this kind of fault almost impossible to find aas with no actual wires holding them in, its hard to do the wiggle it about fault finding method!

Brian

[Huge]

aka "percussive maintenance"

[The Natural Philosopher]

I had a TV like that.

I eventually resoldered every corroded eyelet in the PCB..and it kept going for years till; te house got struck by lightning. That really was the end.

The freelander would occasionally not start till I slammed the rear passenger offside door hard.

Eventually it totally died, and they towed it away to fit a new fuel pump.

[Rick Hughes]

My first 'on desk computer' a MAC SE 4/40 Often they would fail to start up ... call IT, they would come up .. pick up SE30 and bang it down hard on table .... apparently the HDD parked heads on power off and the ver used in early Macs would stick.

Quite amazing to thing we had full OS. MS Office and a whole bundle of other programs as well as saved files all on a 40 MB hard hard.

[Bob Eager]

+1. 2 x 360k floppies...

[Gary]

It was impossible to explain why the 3.5 inch floppy disk was still called a floppy disk. It was obviously a hard disk.

[Tim]

Hard case maybe but floppy on the inside.

Tim

[Dave Liquorice]

Ah you should have got a TD5 Disco, they will run with a knackered fuel pump, just a bit down in performance but will still run.

[Tim Watts]

Bit like Rodders wearing starched underpants...

[Bob Eager]

Indeed, I called them 'stiffies'! Even if the actual disk was floppy.

But the 360k ones mentioned above were bendable. The postman once folded one double to put it through the letterbox.

[brass monkey]

Nascom CP/M I managed a whole 70k on 5.25 floppies :D

[The Natural Philosopher]

You obviously never took one apart.

[Gary]

I said explain. i.e. to the Public.

I had one customer who was indignant that he should not pay for a 3.5mm free plug. He said it was against the law to charge for it.

[Mike Barnes]

Gary :

IIRC it was actually a floppy disk in a hard case.

[Nthkentman]

Works for women too..... . . . . . If you're brave enough to tackle on e that way when she's within arms reach indoors ;-0

[Jules Richardson]

If you take it apart, there's a disc inside, which is floppy. The sort of public who can't understand that are the sort who shouldn't be allowed out of bed in a morning.