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From: plav@cup.portal.com (Rick M Plavnicky)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.hardware
Subject: Hardware QC at C=
Message-ID: <30148@cup.portal.com>
Date: 23 May 90 03:11:57 GMT
Organization: The Portal System (TM)
Lines: 38

I have a minor gripe WRT C= Quality Control, concerning my 2 month old
A2091.  Here's the story, please excuse its length...

Last Sunday I bought 2 megs of memory to populate the board.  Powered
down, popped the board out, installed the chips (even looked at the
manual first - never hurts, right? :-), moved the jumper, reassembled,
and applied power.

No boot.  Grey screen.  "Maybe a bad chip," I thought.  The manual says
that if the system no longer boots, chances are there are troubles with
the first 512K of expansion.  So I open the system up, reach in and
move the jumper to zero K, and try powering up again.

Boots fine.  Now I'm faced with the never-fun chore of figuring out
which chips are good and which are bad, and a few calls to the vendor
Monday to beef about bad chips...

So, as I'm sitting there, turning the A2091 over and over in my hands
thinking about the task ahead I see...  What's this?  A blob of solder
across 2 pins in one of the banks of RAM sockets!  Look closer.  It's
in the last 512K.  Closely examine the rest.  Sure enough, here's a
joint in the first 512K that looks like it could be cold...

Decision time.  Take an iron to it, or take it to the dealer Monday?

The iron won, and in a few minutes the system was up and running its
RAM test flawlessly.

Once I looked (and I guess I should have FIRST) the defective joints
were visually quite obvious.  Why wasn't this spotted?  Are the boards
tested at all before shipping?

Anybody else have similar problems?  This is defect #2 for this system.
The first was broken hard drive shock mounts, a problem that has been
discussed in this forum before.


/* Rick Plavnicky ...!sun!cup.portal.com!plav  -or-  plav@cup.portal.com */