Breaking into an Acer

[carlsson]

Earlier today I visited my parents, and helped my dad get onto Internet with his "new" computer, an Acer Power 4100 - i.e. a 450 MHz Pentium II (or III even?) class system.

It is a desktop system, of course with proprietary connector layout and so on. While many of these branded desktops used to look similar, I believe every single of them had a slightly different back side.

However, there was a LED that kept flashing even after the power was off. It turns out the network card is always active, and somehow the LED was connected so it will blink for every package on the network, just like the hub in the other room does. It is bad enough to have one device constantly flashing, so I opted to disassemble the computer to find if I could fix it.

Gawd! It took me maybe 30 minutes to figure out where to unscrew in order to remove enough parts to reach the motherboard. The CD-ROM and floppy are mounted on a metal construction which will slide in place, but the fit is so tight that when refitting the construction, I was unable to get it in place without removing the CD first and put it back once the metal bar was aligned. Of course there is a ISA/PCI riser which has to be disconnected in order to remove anything else from the box. Blah, blah.

The face plates for the 5.25" units are slanted, and there was one in front of the CD, shaped like a window to let the connectors come through. I figured if one was to install a second drive but doesn't have a matching window face plate, there will be a gap of about 3-4 mm on each side of the drive, due to the case is slanted and the hole is a bit bigger than it needs to be. So much for design over functionality.

Oh well. After boggling my mind why there was a twisted ribbon cable going from the motherboard to the back side (it appears to be a combined sound and network distribution cable), I found where the LEDs attach. Power switch, power LED, turbo LED.. wait here, since when did Pentium II class systems and upwards have a turbo option? Anyway, I disconnected the LED cable and it will not flash anymore.

My dad walked past a few times and cast nervous glances, but I told him I've disassembled and put together more PCs than he has seen in action. It took much longer than I had planned, but I got it all together again and booted it up to see it work well. My conclusion was that the three only items that would allow to be upgraded without too much work would be any expansion cards, memory upgrade and replace HDD.

Speaking of HDD, there was a mysterious door on the back side of the computer, just below the PSU. Once the plastic was snapped off, out came a tray marked HDD, perhaps for secondary drive. A rather inventive place to put it, and I suppose having a power supply just above the hard disk would not make any damage. However, the door was not intended for a removable hard disk, since it would be impossible from the outside to disassemble the IDE and power cables from the drive, so probably it was only a way to easier install and remove the drive once it is neccessary.

From a handyman's perspective, I give this Acer computer two points on a scale 1-5. I've seen even worse stuff, where I was unable to break in or once inside, unable to remove required parts without damaging them. Still, I prefer any noname computer - even a desktop model - any day over these branded ones whose design choices not always seem to have been planned for maintainance.

Finally, a poll: Which brand do you have nightmares of, if any? I tried to cover most somewhat recent PC brands, but I'm sure I have missed at least a few major ones. The poll only allows 10 choices, so therefore I had to group HP and Compaq together, although I'm sure in the old days they were differently difficult.

[mryon]

There are lots of contenders but I think the machines that have given me the most fits are Quadra 800 style Macs.

You had to tear the crazy thing apart just to add RAM.

[Vlad]

Dell SUCKS if you want inside them. Especially the newer ones.

-V

[sbrown]

The absolute worst had to be some of the low-end Compaqs of the Win98 era, from both a hardware and software standpoint when I was crazy enough to try and repair things for money. If they came apart easy they gave me hell recognizing replaced hardware, or the drivers had to be specifically Compaq's or it would complain. OTOH, they were a great advertisment for buying a whitebox from me.

IBM gets points with me simply for everything they've thrown in the x86 market...if it says IBM, somewhere in there is a part that can't be replaced with a compatitable part from the closet.

HPs are almost as bad as Compaqs. I hate low-end consumer machines that dislike being tinkered with.

Dell machines just manage to be different enough to be Dells...weren't they the smart ones that switched the pinouts on some of the ATX PSU's for a while? Just had to work on a Dell Dimension (p4 2400) for a friend...that was only a latch in the back and off the side came. Almost no room for expansion though unless you like having a maze of USB devices.

Packard Bells, or at least the ones I ended up touching, were more useful as boat anchors or doorstops. They were nothing outstanding in performance and the same in their flaws; just too many things that made me want to be somewhere else.

I don't hate Apples, not if I count how easy working on my old IIci is. Their flaw is that too many of them were designed to be not opened & expanded. My case in point was the first time I tried to open up a compact Mac a couple of years ago and learned just how deep those top screws were. I'd never wanted to open a case by hammer and tireiron before that.

My rule-of-thumb is that the cheaper the machine the more problems you can expect. My Sun Ultra2 is so easy to work on it's a shame that it is so stable. A no-name Socket7 board, which wins the award for worst english translation for a manual, that was given to me new had so many quirks, flaws, and outright screw-ups, that it became a fun project just to see how far the results of your actions would be from what you would expect to to get.

And that reminds me of one of those sad conversations I had at the local recycling place/tip. One of the guys that worked there was pointing out a rather new LCD monitor that had just been dropped off to another guy who was going through the massive pile that had just arrived minutes ago. He said, "It's a shame to see these here already when all that's wrong with 99% of them is the backlight or something that isn't the LCD. Too bad that isn't a easily replacable part." My reply was that it may have been done that way 15-20 years ago, but now that would make the monitor 3x as expensive because the makers might actually have to use slightly better parts...and the problem is that it's cheaper to trash them and buy/make another than build it to be repairable. You get what you, or some other poor soul, paid for.

[Mad-Mike]

Most unfriendlly....it depends on the time period and model to me...

The simplest issue are on old XT and AT clone chassis from around 1983-1987, most of those are a hair off on slot spacing, so if you get a later 486 motherboard on up, you might have some card slot seating issues. Probably one of the few good things to come with new computers, much closer slot seating tolerances.

Stuff with Drive Rails can be of minor annoyance. The worst of em all are the old Compaq Deskpro 8086/286/386 and the GEM 386/20 gone PIII I have, as it's hard to find those aluminum drive rails in the first place, especially now, and the ones you do find often have to be milled slightly to fit newer components or whatever. The second worst are old AT drive rails, but at least I can go to lowes and make suitable replacements for a few bucks out of some cheap plastic or aluminum without much fuss ore resizing. Packard Bells with rails, I just use washers and holes in the chassis to fit drives, the rails are as big as the hard drive anyway in height.

All in one's are bad, but Macintosh all-in-ones are the worst, especially the 128K/512K/Plus, you have to use a special tool or carefully pop the case, then discharge the picture tube, and DONT knock around like I always do (for fear of rupturing the tube and pulling out pieces of glass from my gut), just to replace a widdle memory chip or 30 pin SIMM, or to swap the hard disk out with something bigger/faster. The IBM EduQuests only suck because Kids tear up the brightness and contrast controls, and then to get at them, you need to unplug the board from the inside and pull it out, and it WOULD have been okay if IBM made that possible, but NO, the controls are hard wired.

Packard Bell 386 and 486 as well as the old Dell 286 and 386 LPX machines win the stupidity award for CMOS battery placement. Dell used to hang them right over the keyboard address lines! So one day the battery ruptures in storage and eats up the whole Keyboard address lines on the motherboard, rendering the computer good for nothing more than doorstoppin' and boat anchorin'. Packard Bell one upped Dell by putting the battery on their cheap boards ON THE BOARD, though I'll admit it's not just Packard Bell, but also quite a few motherboard manufacturers of that time like DFI, PC CHips, and Keytronic who did this, and many of those boards, the battery ruptures and the darned thing won't even POST! The best place I ever saw the battery located on a computer from the 286-486 era was on the GEM 386 DX-20 I case modded into a Pentium III, the battery was seated right on the BOTTOM of the chassis, if it leaked, assuming the computer was not stored sideways, all the acid would neatly flow under the motherboard (saved by the 5-8mm of standoffs holding it up, and harm nothing except maybe the bottom metal. That's the way a computer SHOULD be designed.

THe 386-Pentium 1 Era Compaqs are pretty bad too, mostly because of odd sized drives that only Compaq makes, or the 2225 from 1998, a hideously designed K6 box, that only accepts up to 64MB of RAM total, has a Seagate BIGFOOT hard disk (bigger platters = longer load times, and with 40 million tons of Porn scattered across all 6GB of capacity, that's pretty bad). Not to mention the air-redirector for the cPU (which does not even have a fan) is a piece of cardboard with double stick tape on it. Chintzy. Win98 and Later compaqs, as well as HPs, apparently have junk for motherboards. When I was freelancing in Alabama, I replaced those on a regular basis, including one of my own! Gateway also takes the cake for this junk too. Hence why I HATE Consumer grade PCs with a passion. I think that GEMs here to stay till I'm long gone.

IM DCSE Certified as of current, and probably the worst laptop to deal with are the Dell 9200 and 9400 laptops! Screws, screws, screws, screws, screws, screws, and more screws, more screws than a Brothel! More screws than..well, I'd rather not say! When I did warranty repair work, those were the worst to work on, and they always blew something major like the motherboard or CPU, just to make sure I'd HAVE to remove around 150-650 screws and keep track of them ALL! IT would not be so bad, but e-gods, everything is nailed down with some variant of the tiny black screw with some minor differences that you won't find out until it's too late! The AT&T Safari 3151, while thankfully a great notebook, is a REAL PITA to work on, because to remove the screen you have to take teh whole thing apart, and if you don't seat the screen connector JUST right, you'll have screen problems till you correct it.

I could go on for days more, but I think I'll leave it at that. Otherwise, my favorite computers to work on are these.....

White Box XT's with flip top cases, it's like working on a car! I can run it and diagnose from the inside at the same time. I wish Aopen or In-Win would take note and make a Retro-Case based off those, that's how they'd get ME to buy a new case.

The Kapok/Sager 486 5110/9200 Laptops are all snap off and use desktop CPUs and all modules are accessable and configurable from under the snap-off keyboard.

And while the drive rails are a pain, anything full size AT or that's a server tower is a real pleasure to work on, why, because it won't draw blood from my knuckles while routing cables, installing CPU's, and swapping memory.

[CP/M User]

Not that their probably -all- unfriendly, but some of those early Apple
Macs are a bit suss with the Disk Drive inside a box with the monitor. No
wonder they created the term "Apple Serviceman" - designed in handling
hardware without Electruiting themselves (from the monitor or gawd
knows what else they put in that thing). It needed a seperate box & they
did this later on - but occasionally they just had to stick all the guts into
the monitor! :-(

CP/M User.

[carlsson]

Oh yes, the Pentium II-class Acer in question appeared to use AT power connectors, but had a soft power on. OTOH, I remember even EISA class machines had soft power on, so it's doable. I don't know if it was true AT or some custom stuff.

Someone dropped off a few fully functional Dell PSUs at the computer club, but even after looking up the pinout, I found they were incompatible with ATX to the point that not even rewiring it would work. To confuse further, Dell later moved to standard ATX and those two types of connectors look the same IIRC, a big danger for someone unknowing of the difference who is assigned to maintainance.

[Vlad]

I never had any trouble with Mac's of any era. But by far the most friendly I have seen are good ol'e IBM. They never made it hard. (For me atleast) I think it's unfair to lump Compaq and HP togather. They wern't one company until just last year. I would rather work with Compaq than an HP. Gawd those Vectras made me want to explode or something. I always kinda liked Compaq.

-V

[Terry Yager]

The term 'Broken by Design' comes to mind. Appliance computers today are meant to be disposable.

One of my favorite PITAs is some of the old 4-chip SBCs built around the Z80. They invariably consist of a CPU, a standard ROM, standard RAM, and one honkin' big-ass custom chip that is completely undocumented. Now that's real computin'...

--T

[Micom 2000]

There are so many that fit in the PITA category. Macs"the friendly computers" being the worst. Also all Laptops. IBM was about the most hardware friendly. Likely because they had such simpleton repairmen who could only follow the FRU replacement instructions. Compaq was also hardware friendly but terrorist in replacement compatability and configuration. DEC was good hardwareize but headshaking in configuration. In almost all the clones you had to find your own way because of the abysmal manuals written by non-english speakers using their jobs to give them enough english to go to the west and make big bucks. ASUS mbs were good but the otherwise good manuals not always accurate.

Lawrence