Posted on 09/04/2024 11:06:50 AM PDT by fireman15
Local repair shops say electronics manufacturers are not following a new law, meant to eliminate intentional barriers currently in place that make it difficult for them to do their jobs fairly.
Nearly two months after going into effect, the conditions of SB-244, the Right to Repair Act, are not being followed by some manufacturers, that's according to a couple local repair shops.
“‘Right to Repair’ is the idea you should be able to fix anything you own,” said Liz Chamberlain, Director of Sustainability for iFixit, a San Luis Obispo-based company specializing in creating repair guides and manuals for electronics.
But if you don’t have the right tools, that can become nearly impossible.
“We call it flying blind,” said Eric Vanderlip, store manager for Coast Electronics in San Luis Obispo.
On July 1st, SB-244 went into effect requiring appliance and electronics companies to share repair manuals, parts, and tools with repair shops and service dealers. Without these items, large companies can make it practically impossible for “mom and pop” shops to fix your appliances and electronics. Vanderlip uses an automotive analogy.
“It would be like your car manufacturer saying, ‘We’re the only ones that can change your tires,’ and at a certain point, they can no longer change your tires. I mean, come on,” said Vanderlip.
(Excerpt) Read more at ksby.com ...
It turns out that the LEDs in most flat screen televisions are wired in series and if just one burns out in a way that breaks the circuit, the television no longer has a picture that can be seen.
My parents TV had 9 LED strips all wired together in series. Since the individual LEDs are "surface mounted" to the strips it takes special equipment and skills to replace them, so first I checked into replacing one of the 9 strips. None were available, and in fact the strips were glued into the TV in a way that made them difficult to remove.
So I purchased a 100 replacement LEDs for $10, a "soldering work station" with tiny hot air nozzles, and some special paste solder that is helpful when trying to use a "work station". I replaced the two LEDs and the set started working again.
Unfortunately, I chipped a piece of the screen when trying to reinstall the bezzles that hold the screen in place; the screen was destroyed by a tiny chip. No economical repair to it could be made or replacement part found. At that point I harvested the parts that might be useful to others, and I now have a 55" lit white screen that looks like a TV that might make a good picture frame or something to things on. I am fairly certain my wife will insist I take it to the dump if she sees it.
These things could be made easy to take apart and put back together. The parts and manuals could be made available to the public and repair shops, but they are not. It is more profitable to produce products that either cannot be fixed, or must be returned to the manufacturer for repair. It is called "planned obsolescence". I have a black and white Zenith Super R Chassis television from 1955. It still works, and when something goes wrong with it, I can still figure it out fairly easily. Replacement tubes and parts are getting to be nearly impossible to find and what is available are often not working anymore from sitting for nearly 70 years. But obviously this is not something that I blame the manufacturer for.
But we now have things like big screen televisions that are designed to fail within a few years and be nearly impossible to repair. Computers and phone are even worse. Many have software built into them that detect if you have installed a replacement part and will not work even if you make a good repair.
Right now the car industry is moving toward the Tesla model of molding much of the car as a single piece of material. This lowers the cost of manufacture (fewer parts), but if any part of the car gets damaged then there is the possibility that the car will be unrepairable if the damage is significant, rather than just replacing the panel that was damaged.
Back in the mid 80s, an aunt’s then husband was a higher up engineer and he told a few of us at some gathering that his roommate got a job at GM after graduation.
His first job was to design parts to wear out in 6 years.
I recommend antique stores. You can get things that can be repaired.
My current computer is a 2003 Gateway notebook. All of the more recent machines I have bought have died. Only this old machine works and it has fluorescent backlighting.
The good news is that round-a-bouts are now very popular in my area. We are ready for the return of the horse-and-buggy.
As the global population ages and dies out there will be less demand. As China ramps up production in all manner of stuff from basic commodities to sophisticated electronics and automobiles, there is just not enough demand to sop up all the supply.
So we have to declare war on China, etc. in order to get them to turn their factories over to making bombs, planes, etc. that we hope they will never have to use.
Wouldn't it be better if the World's leaders would just fess up that there is too much junk being made? Instead of building more military hardware, why can't we build a bunch of space probes, rockets, moon bases, etc. Rather than lobbing stuff at each other, lets lob stuff into space and gain more knowledge about the universe and humans' abilities to live off planet.
“The good news is that round-a-bouts are now very popular in my area. “
They love them some round-a-bouts here in Colorado. They’re so European you know.
You are 100 percent correct.
I really like the Ineos Grenadier (a newish truck, very old school) for that reason.
Every bit of it is modular and easily repaired in the field.
We need to adopt the more-expensive but well made model of manufacturings.
There’s a huge market for this.
Look kids Big Ben ... Parliament ...... how the heck you get out of this
I have a Dell laptop that came with XP.
It was refurbished from EBay when I bought the unit a couple of years ago for very little.
Still working. I use it for some games that only run on CP.
Car manufacturers do their level best, staying within the letter of the law, to make it work that way. Cars that require special manufacturer tools to correctly complete an oil change, for example.
I hated round-a-bouts when I lived in England in the 80s and I hate them even more here in the U.S.
They were ideal for a pre-electric horse-and-buggy society, but mostly dangerous now.
I have fixed a lot of computers that have had malfunctioning hardware over the years. I replaced many inverters (ballasts) and also the tiny fluorescent tubes found in old laptops. I always assumed that LED back-lighting would be more dependable and longer lasting, but as my parent's flat screen television has proved... this is definitely not the case.
It is interesting how newer hardware often tends to fail shortly after the machines go past their warranties. I always have assumed that extended warranties were a complete rip-off, but I have bought a couple recently for items that were obviously not going to be repairable if they failed. The most recent example was a tiny “Remote ID” for large older drones that I paid $35 for. The extended warranty for the Remote ID was $3.99 and the chances of it being damaged or malfunctioning are fairly high...
My parent's television should have been easy to diagnose and repair. The primary problems are that it is difficult to find parts and documentation and also to take apart and reassemble without damaging something.
I have laptops that still work from 2003 and I try to keep the batteries charged to 20% and 70% to keep them from going bad. I keep these laptops because they are part of my collection of vintage electronic and computer hardware which is one of my hobbies. I have computer and electronic hardware going back to the mid 1970s, some of it from kits.
That said, your laptop is an antique by modern computer standards. I assume that it came with Windows XP. If you have not installed a Linux build on it; you probably should consider doing so for security, dependability, and compatibility.
When the motherboard on my wife's 4-year-old laptop failed a few months ago, I was able to find a used laptop motherboard that fit her case which came with a GPU.
It was actually an upgrade and ironically because the other model of computer was not as popular as hers the used motherboard was about half the price of the exact replacement. The only complication was that I had to find a new fan and heatsink that fit the replacement motherboard. So, she ended up with a significant upgrade to her computer.
If you have a name brand laptop used, parts are usually available. Most tend not to be that difficult to repair. But Apple started making them intentionally impossible to repair years ago. So on the computer side of things it is largely Apple users who have tended to be involved in the Right to Repair movement.
Thank you for the reply.
Yes. The 2003 laptop came with XP. Its main deficiency is a limitation of on-board RAM. I have Ubuntu 10 running on it. I can install 16, but the RAM is just too limited - it takes about half an hour to boot. I use a SSD with a SATA-PATA adapter for storage.
I am surprised at how nice the display looks. It is not widescreen, but is probably higher resolution than most you can get, today. It had a built-in modem, but no networking. Fortunately, it used mini-PCI for the modem and I could just replace this with WiFi.
I will say that I have lost the bug for making computers work. I am more interested in old TI calculators with LED displays!
It is none of my business, so if you are happy with your current set-up... then more power to you.
But you might think about saving your nickels and dimes and purchasing a much more capable 10-year-old Windows 7 name brand laptop from eBay from a reputable seller. A decent looking laptop with 8GB of RAM will probably set you back $8 or $90 with shipping. The last one I bought like this was a Lenovo G560 for about $50.
Pop in a $30 512GB 2.5” SSD and install a current version of Ubuntu. It will boot up in about a minute. Personally, I like Ubuntu Studio; it comes with almost every program you could ever need already installed.
If you really want to splurge... a new battery for a name brand laptop this age is usually around $20 on Amazon and they pop in and out without taking the computer apart.
If you buy it from a reputable seller the laptop will likely have free returns if it as got something wrong with it.
My Lenovo G560 with a Pentium 5 and 8GBs of RAM is from 2010. I have it set up to dual boot. It has no problem running the latest versions of Ubuntu or Windows 10.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.