Is it just me, or does everyone else hate working from electronic service
manuals? Yes, I know that it's very convenient to be able to download
manuals from manufacturers, and to be able to trade them around, but boy, do
they make our life hard, or what ?

Today, I have been working on a Pioneer semi pro mixer desk. The manual is
on CDROM and is 176 pages long, so not practical to print the whole thing
out. It has been created using 'virtual A4' sheets, so the many big complex
diagrams, such as the DSP board, have been spread across multiple
disconnected pages. Helpfully (Ha!) they have put little diagrams at the
left side of the sheets to indicate that what you are looking at is a big
sheet, that they've kindly rendered into little sheets for you ...

So as well as having to follow signal and power lines between 'real' pages,
as you would have to in a paper manual, but which was easy to do, because it
told you exactly where to go looking for the line's carry-on, you also have
to follow these lines across broken up sheets, with little indication as to
where you will find the carry-on. All in all, I wasted about an hour and a
half, staring at a computer screen, zooming, de-zooming, rotating and
printing individual bits of the schematics and layouts, just to work out
where a couple of supply rails had disappeared to on the DSP board. If this
had been a proper Pioneer paper manual, the whole exercise would have been
trivial, taking perhaps 15 minutes total. Who pays for this wasted time ?

The initial problem is a couple of s.m. fuses that are open. Of course, they
are specials, so I have now got to go back to the manual to try to find part
numbers for them. There is also a problem with the VFD not illuminating now
that I have (tempoarily) restored the missing rails, so I suppose there is
now going to have to be another lengthy session, trying to sort out the
appropriate bits of schematic to get to the bottom of this fault ...

Sorry lads. rant over ... :-)

Arfa