Hardware Diagnostics (Was: A talent for repair)

[Fabio FZero]

On Tue, Jul 27, 2010 at 01:47, Scott Sullivan <scott-lxSQFCZeNF4 at public.gmane.org> wrote:
> My question to the list is this,
>
>    What would it take to get manufactures to making their products
> serviceable again?

Well, that's a bit relative. If you're talking notebooks, things have
actually improved lately. It was almost impossible to do a simple
memory or hard drive upgrade on a laptop 10-12 years ago. Right now,
even Macbooks can be easily opened touching a few screws - and, yes,
the newer models are getting progressively easier to service. Even the
"non-replaceable" battery can be quite easily replaced!

The same holds true for Toshiba, Asus, Dell and most other brands I
can remember. But I think I know what you mean: you want to replace
video-cards, change processors or maybe even the motherboard. A few
years ago I would agree that would be interesting, but with the huge
offer of external everything (yes, even videocards) along with the
fact that lately every new processor requires a different chipset, I
doubt this would be really useful.

And let's not forget that the space inside notebooks is quite crammed.
I find it incredible they are somewhat serviceable as it is right now.
While it *is* possible to make the components even more accessible,
this would certainly increase the size of the machines and probably
sacrifice aesthetics (even if you don't mind this, lots of people do).

Having said that, I remember that Acer (or was it Asus?) released a
"build your own laptop" kit a while ago. It was somewhat popular in
Brazil. One could buy an "empty" notebook with keyboard, screen and
motherboard to add the rest of the components manually. I'll try to
find this to post here.

- FZero
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