"The Daring Dufas" wrote in message
news:itvuf4$e0e$1@dont-
Well, I think the MTBF was rated a bit low. I pick up those things, plug
them up and they run. For something 30+ years old that's not
too bad. Do you remember the original Lear 8 track tape players
and the units produced by Delco for GM? The construction was massive
and tough as nails. When the Asians started building them they made
them out of tin cans. :-)
Don't underestimate the Asians. We shipped them the remains of NYC's Third
avenue elevated subway scrap iron that came back to haunt us as Mitsubishi
Zeros. Saw a great piece on "History Detectives" about how they traced an
engine rocker arm found on a private Hawiian island (must be nice!) with
english markings to one of the early zeros, circa 1941 from a Zero that
crashed there. Great story about how the downed pilot was able to terrorize
*most* of the islanders with his wing machine guns except for the guy that
rushed him and killed him.
I made a living for a while upgrading the original IBM PC's that came with
the huge full height floppies using the far inferior (but IBM logoed) PC JR
half heights that flooded the market when the junior went under.
Take out the full height, replace them with two half-heights and a 20MB
drive. Even learned how to copy the XT bios onto a blank (ssshhh - don't
tell IBM) because the clones did not come with BASIC. Still remember
writing my first BASICA program using the SOUND command. Up until then,
programs were something you punched onto cards that eventually spit out a
fan-fold printout and nothing more. What a kick to hear a computer make
sounds.
Then I started selling clones I built with the half-heights because people
didn't really know what a "clone" was. All they knew was that the diskette
drives said IBM in big letters. As long as it worked and I helped them load
and run their apps (DbaseII - which needed a memory upgrade - I used the AST
multifunction boards - to 256K!) they didn't care. They certainly got NO
support from Computerland once they walked out the door. Yes, multiple
counts of fraud and infringement, but the statute of limitations has long
since expired.
My original black IBM PC power supply crapped out quite early, but then
again I was running the absolutely dreadful CMI 20MB hard drives that taught
me early in life that a) you can't have too many backups and b) a backup
isn't a backup until you've been able to restore in correctly. In those
days bad floppy disks were the norm, not the exception. I remember throwing
away boxes of IBM branded 5.25" disks because they would not format 100%.
Those that *accidentally* managed a full format wouldn't hold data worth a
damn.
To keep back on topic, today I am recharging all the NiMH cells that I fully
recharged at the beginning of the year. My 4 cell LaCrosse charge has an
LCD display that reads out all important battery parameters. If I stick
them in the charger after 6 months and they are at 0 volts, off they go to
the trash. If they accept a charge well above their rated capacity, in the
trash they go. That process alone has increased overall battery reliability
incredibly. The wedding photogs I know swear by them. A hinky NiMH cell
can spell disaster if it causes them to miss a "money" shot.
Life's too short to "burn off whiskers" (when I tried that, the whiskers
soon grew back). I stopped when I had some explode - I charged them inside
an old .50 cal ammo box. The AAA's sound like .22's and the AA's sound like
..38's going off. Life's also too short to get caught flat-footed with a
battery that *should* have been thrown out but wasn't.
NiMH cells are enough of a problem when they're in tip-top shape, especially
in cameras. As someone else noted, they are most useful only hot from the
charger. Every hour they are out means a subtle drop in voltage that makes
a digicam read them as dead when they still have plenty of current left.
If I was dirt poor I'd probably push every milliamp second out of them but
I'm not, so high-ho, high-ho, in the trash they go. The LaCrosse charger
proved one thing - Ebay NiMH cells from China are HORRIBLY overrated. Those
marked 3000 are hardly 900 mAh.
I can't recommend the new chargers with individual cell readouts highly
enough. Expensive but worth every penny in culling the battery herd. Tells
you how much of a charge the battery has taken, has "recondition" modes,
etc.
La Crosse Technology BC-9009 AlphaPower Battery Charger
I'd post a URL but all of them are 8 miles long and include ID numbers.
Someday Google will learn that people don't send URLs that are 100's of
characters long to other potential customers and yes, I know about TinyURL -
that still doesn't remove the tracking numbers that vendors like to stuff
into their URLs these days. Track this Google --!--
http://www.google.com/search?q=La+Cr...nology+BC-9009
OK - that works.
--
Bobby G.