Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!att!pacbell!belltec!jim
From: jim@belltec.UUCP (Mr. Jim's Own Logon)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc
Subject: Re: Resolution of "XT Clone Takes Forever to Boot" problem
Summary: You won't be satisfied for long....
Message-ID: <257@belltec.UUCP>
Date: 30 Aug 88 16:07:34 GMT
References: <1001@acornrc.UUCP>
Organization: Bell Technologies, Fremont, CA
Lines: 35

In article <1001@acornrc.UUCP>, bob@acornrc.UUCP (Bob Weissman) writes:
> A while ago, I posted a message describing how my El Cheapo XT clone
> was taking longer and longer to boot up at power-on.......
> 
> Saturday it stopped booting at all.  I finally gave in and took it to
> the store where I bought it.....
> 
> Much to my surprise, the technician opened it right up and asked a few
> pertinent questions about the machine's behavior.  Then she started
> swapping plug-in boards.  She swapped the monographics (Hercules clone)
> adaptor twice before finding one that worked.
> 
> Lo and behold, El Cheapo booted right up.  The monographics
> display/printer card was the culprit.
> 
> Fry's has a satisfied customer here.
> 
> -- 
> Bob Weissman

  Sounds like good technical debugging. Takes out the display card (almost
certainly a good board in another machine), plugs in a known good board and
it fails, plugs in another known good board and it fails, finally plugs in
a third known good board and it works. This time. A week from now, who knows.
When it gets cold in 6 months, maybe it won't work again. As the parts age,
maybe it will work better, but you know better than that.

   If there is a broken board, that's one thing. But when you have to match
a certain set of boards to bet it to work, you haven't solved anything. You 
have just postponed the problem, probably unitl a week after your waranty has
expired. A good technician should have tested further, or at the very least
tested the original display card in another machine to see if it was truely
bad.

				-Jim  "Technicians don't get ulcers"  Wall