[Repairs] Fwd: Re: XO mobo repairs; 'scopes?

Nicholas Bodley nbodley at speakeasy.net
Wed Jun 18 07:32:12 EDT 2008


Richard gave me permission to forward this. -- nb

------- Forwarded message -------
From: "Richard Smith" <richard at laptop.org>
To: "Nicholas Bodley" <nbodley at speakeasy.net>
Subject: Re: XO mobo repairs; 'scopes?
Date: Fri, 13 Jun 2008 03:53:31 -0400

[nb]
> Are mobo's considered too inexpensive to repair? IIrc it was Seth who  
> said
> they cost $12 each. That seems pretty low, but maybe just possible,
> considering economies of scale.

[RS]
$12 is a bit low.

Richard says {it's a good bit more than that}, cheap, but not that cheap.

[nb]
> The threshold of "beyond economical repair" might be quite different in  
> some third-world countries, where $12 is a lot of money.

[RS]
It's more about skill and equipment rather than money.

[nb]
> Would a 'scope of modest performance be of use in a regional or national
> repair center? What about hot-air rework equipment, so that VLSI could be
> replaced?

[RS]
For a lot of the low speed stuff. Yeah.  Right now we don't [have] much  
data
on motherboard failures.  Most of them are broken LCD, or broken
connectors.

For repairs that involve the motherboard we were sort of thinking that
partnering with some sort of tech, or engineering school would be
good.  The students could practice troubleshooting and repair on the
broken boards.

But it's hard to answer until we get some good data on what the
problems are.  Once we give Uruguay a manual that they can use to
diagnose failures down to the primary components ( Keyboard, LCD,
Motherboard, etc) and then they have someone analyze motherboard
failures then we will have a better guess at what you might need.

-- 
Nicholas Bodley
Waltham, Mass.


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