Computer problem solved

Human nature maybe.

Reply to
philo
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That's nice. I'm quite familiar with Exide myself. One of their plants *was* a little ways down the road from me. They're supposedly going to be restarting operations soon. I used to get killer deals on various types of batteries, because, a very close friends wife worked there at the time. She's not doing well health wise now as a result of that job, though. Walking around in battery acid upto your knees tends to take it's toll on you, protective gear or not.

BD told me you were some genius with computers too, and I found out differently after chatting with you for a bit, so You'll have to excuse me if I question other things you may discuss at this point.

It's not that I have a personal issue of any kind with you, it's all about my thirst for knowledge. Inaccurate knowledge is tainted, you understand.

The reason I asked was because you bought them overseas and didn't provide any information other than sticking them in the machine and away they went. Depending on the internals of the battery, it may have a 'long shelf' life; but you didn't define what that means to you, either.

That, I do understand. :)

I did something very close to this last week! I purchased another external HD to make a near network wide backup. I've already got various backups, but, for some reason, I wanted to make another one, that day, on a fresh drive. I had no logical reason to do so, so soon. Slimer isn't even giving a hint of pending hardware/software failures, but, My mind is at ease now knowing everything on it and a few other boxes is safely stored on yet another drive.

Reply to
Diesel

My first Toyota Yaris was but I'm not sure about the second. I took what I could get because I found myself needing a new ride at the same time Japan was having a few problems including a nuclear meltdown.

Reply to
rbowman

Ironically after the buy outs , Exide is no longer Exide.

Enersys-Delaware bought all of the Exide technology including the manufacturing facilities and Exide was nothing but a name owned by /some/ of the original owners. They in turn bought out Gould National Battery which have previously bought out Chloride Battery (which is where I originally started)

So if you want the superior Exide technology you need to go to Enersys.

Enserys-Delaware bought out Hawker and the chargers use super-efficient high frequency conversion . Exide chargers use the old Chloride ferroresonant transformers. Although some mfg's make reliable transformers the ones they use are the same old unreliable design they have used ever since the days they were Berg-Gibson.

As to the batteries themselves both Exide and Enersys make a decent enough flat plate battery but Enderys-Delaware is the only US mfg making a vastly superior tubular battery.

BTW: For five years, Yuasa was the majority owner of Exide and all of us were worried about the Japanese ownership, but nothing changed at all other than the fact that they gave out Turkeys every Thanksgiving. They must have thought that was a good American thing to do.

When it became Enersys-Delaware and 100% American again they did the American thing and closed their oldest plant in Lexington and started making the flat plate batteries in Mexico.

After some initial quality control issues were straightened out, we had much less problem with the Mexican batteries than those built in the US.

It was me just being modest and I do admit to not being much of a programmer...but as far as actually trouble-shooting and repairing I am battery pretty near 1000. I don't know if I've ever worked on computer I could not fix. One of my most harrowing repairs was repairing the electronics on a failed hard drive. I found a bad solder joint on a surface mount capacitor. I then gave the owner of the machine a lecture on backing up.

I bought them a few years ago and their OC voltage is still 3.3v and they appear identical in every way to the batteries I've purchased locally.

Reply to
philo

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So Enersys is responsible for the bankruptcy that closed the Bristol plant?

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No, thanks.

If you can't read/write code, you're limited. Sorry, but, you are. The computer still 0wns you, you don't 0wn it.

I realize you're quite a bit older than myself, but, my electronics troubleshooting background isn't exactly new. I was repairing tv's, stereos, etc, and later, vhs based vcrs; previously beta max; which was superior, but, still lost out, long before I became a teenager. Some kids did the dishes for allowance, I fixed neighbors equipment for mine.

As far as your troubleshooting skills go, how often did you have to rely on other peoples software to deal with something, and how often did you resort to reloading Windows to fix a software issue? I'm pretty sure I've got you beat on both counts, as in, much lower numbers.

Try removing a soldered eeprom to reflash it off the mainboard for the user. and then, reinstall it to the mainboard, without destroying it in the process. The board, or the eeprom. That's harrowing. All because said user interrupted a bios flashupdate in progress. They thought they were fuxored. They nearly were.

Ever remove an active copy of lojack from a laptop without losing any data or otherwise harming the laptop? I have. Ever encounter a password locked Dell where the password was set on the HD itself? I have. And, I succesfully unlocked the hard disk, too. No, sticking the HD in another machine won't give you any access to the drive contents, if that's what you were thinking. :) The machine won't even be able to identify the drive, because the circuitry on the controller board on the drive itself is locked out. Trying to get cheeky and swap controller boards will not unlock the drive either; it's mated to the mechanical section at this point and will not allow you any access. In case you had that in mind as the next step.

Ever crack Autocard r13 as a teenager, and make thousands by selling a couple of cracked copies? I have.

Ever enjoy all the channels one could get via dish/directv via emulation and reprogramming smart cards? I've done that too.

It pays to be a coder.

Reply to
Diesel

I only have familiarity of the US operations but that plant closing was an Exide plant which is absolutely nothing to do with Enersys.

I seriously doubt you would be using forklift batteries or stationary batteries. I doubt you ever would have anything bigger than a car battery and I did not deal with those.

It's not like I can't do it, but I prefer the hardware end of things.

Way back around the year 2000 I went so far as compiling my own Linux kernel . In a way it was kind of challenging and fun but that type of stuff is not my cup of tea.

I repaired my first radio (an AM portable) when I was 12 years old. I did my first computer repair in 1979. For a post graduate course I built a 6800 based computer that was used to program EPROMS. It had four 10k memory boards and one of them only registered as 8k. My professor could not figure it out but I eventually did. It was a bad PCB feed through.

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I never have had to reload Windows to fix a software problem. Back in the days of Win98 I did occasionally get a machine that was was so infected the only thing that made sense was to re-load Windows.

In the case I recall off hand, it would have taken hours to trace down every last trace of infection yet barely took an hour to back up the tiny amount of data and reload

For many years I repaired circuit boards on my job and have plenty of experience replacing IC's. Never unsoldered an EPROM though. My "lab" at home does not have the good vacuum desoldering tool I had at work. I've had plenty of dumb customers but never one foolish enough to interrupt an EPROM flash

LOL, when I was a teen I was into tube-style amateur radio equipment.

If I can't claim to have removed lojac, I don't think you've ever neutralized the tank circuit of a DX-100 transmitter.

Your argument only proves people have different skills

Threw my TV out 25 years ago. I don't have anything to do with that shit

Reply to
philo

Someone brought me a power supply for a very high end film scanner. It has four bridge rectifiers two of which had been replaced a while back. One of the original ones is bad but I'm going to replace the still-good original one as well. They are about $8 each.

**Are you sure they are Diodes' and not the Triacs
Reply to
Tony944

Not sure if I've run across one I couldn't fix either, but I've run across quite a few I shouldn't have. I've spent more time on quite a few than they were worth, so now I choose my battles. Back when a PC cost $1200 and labour was $10 an hour it made sense to spend time on a dead or flakey machine. When you can replace a PC with a good 2 or 3 year old off lease computer for $199 and labour is $35 and up an hour, it just doesn't make sense any more in many cases. At the factory where I spend 2 afternoons a week we have a stock of off-lease Lenovos to replace dead factory floor machines (which were off-lease Lenovos 7 years ago) Some were $99 and some were $199 - depending where and when we bought them. Most of the ones from the era of swelling caps have now died and been replaced. I re-capped a few of the first ones to die, but now if it's more than a hard drive or a power supply it's off to the recyclers - and if I don't have a good salvaged power supply those with bad power supplies suffer the same fate. Replacing the old ones upgrades from XP to Win7Pro at the same time for no extra cost - - -

Reply to
clare

Yep, simple bridge rectifier.

The box he gave me just contains the transformer and rectifiers.

It plugs into the device which I assume has a filter caps and regulation.

It's simple and straightforward.

I've worked on this type of equipment since the 70's

Reply to
philo

One thing I don't bother to do is re-cap.

First off I can get replacement mobos on eBay for next to nothing and good caps are not cheap.

I did attempt it once and replaced all the ones that were visually bad, bit the mobo still did not work due to others being bad as well. I decided not to bother, it was a waste of time.

Reply to
philo

Yes, they were diodes. They were probably for over 100 amps. About as big around as a half dollar, one end had screw threads about 3/8 inch in diameter and a brade with a large lug on the other end.

Reply to
Ralph Mowery

They are 35 amp bridge rectifiers

that look like this

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Reply to
philo

When doing a cap job, you may as well go ahead and do them all. So you don't run into problems like you experienced, later on. Visual inspection alone is not sufficient to determine caps condition...Considering your electronics background? you should have known that and not opted for the route you took. I'm going to chalk this one off as boredom on your part. :) It does get old, kind of fast, desoldering/soldering a pile of various sized caps.

When the suspect (depending on which story you go with) caps came to light, it was cheaper to replace them on the boards than it was to replace the board, risk changing out the chipset, and having to modify the windows registry so it does a driver hunt, instead of trying to load on a different board which usually (but not always) results in a BSOD instead.

Reply to
Diesel
[snip]
*drool* same here! but, I started in the 80s. [g] I wasn't doing much in the 70s, considering I was born two years prior to the end of that decade. Which, imho, made a lot of great music! They got a pile of my allowance and other monies acquired from various repairs I described in a long post. [g] A super sized 'word wall' to you, no doubt.
Reply to
Diesel

It's good to see you telling the truth, Dustin! :-)

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Reply to
David B.

Yes, it was nothing critical, just the need to fool with something for the heck of it. Even if I would have repaired the mobo, withing having replaced all the caps I never would have trusted it.

I did not have enough capacitors in my junkbox to do the whole thing and to replace all of them would have cost way more that buying a cheap replacement board on eBay.

It was an older P-4 and not even worth repairing in the first place

Reply to
philo

Congrats Clare Remember you want to wear out; not rust out. That worked for me for awhile then I bottomed out health wise. Time for you to enjoy life - no regrets!

Reply to
Tekkie?

Yes, I do. :) And you're right. The best time to get into coding is when you're a kiddo. And, stick with it, of course.

Reply to
Diesel

There's ways, you know, using software to do a 'burn in' test on the board to determine if it's stable.

Reply to
Diesel

I intend to keep busy. I'll be playing nurse to my wife after heart surgery later this spring, then hopefully we'll get to do a bit of travelling. Daughter is getting married this fall, so mabee I should learn to dance?? I've got 2 left feet. Need to get the plane finished too, and hopefully get my pilot's licence - might need to get cataracts fixed first - - then I've got most of the makings for a replica Briggs and Stratton Flier as well as a "Red Bug" to get completed sometime before I die too. That's all after I get the lawn back in shape, and I need to get a new roof on my shed, and likely rebuild the rear deck. I'm not likely to run out of stuff to do for a few years.

A friend out at the airport is restoring a '67 Camaro RS as well as a '36 or '37 Ford pickup - I've helped on his '31 model A and his '59 'vette in the past - so if I get a hankering to turn a wrench there's lots for me to do there too. Also another friend's Isetta needs finishing - he'll likely be asking for help - and hopefully we'll pull his '53 MG TD out and I'll give it some exercise this summer. Mabee the ''71 Fiat Cinco too. He's also working on an old scooter.

Then I've got my wife's 15 year old Taurus and my 21 year old pick-em-up to keep on the road-----. Route 66 is calling, the little woman wants to get to Hawaii, and I'd love to take her to visit "my old stompin' grounds" to see Victoria Falls - and also South Africa and Botswana for some game viewing. As long as the money and our health both hold up, I won't run out of ideas to keep busy!

Reply to
clare

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