DIYbanter - View Single Post

Michael Black[_2_]

On Tue, 5 Aug 2014, wrote:

First of all, this is SCI.ELECTRONICS.REPAIR, not
SCI/ELECTRONICS.BUYANEWONE. If someone wants to buy a new one, they are
not here.

Over the years, lots of people have come by with a problem, and precisely
because they didn't know what to do, they were told "get professional
help" or "replace it".

If you actually read the original post, one minute he's got a professional
working on the tv set, then doesn't trust what the guy said. He needs us
to interpret what he said, which means he has no real background in tv
repair. He also seems to think there's more trust in a random group of
people on the internet than the service guy he paid to fix the set.

Getting help is as much about asking a proper question as simply asking.
Endless people have problems when they post to this hierarchy because thy
have no background, yet expect an answer. They can't even explain the
problem well.

Let's not forget the ones who try to talk their way in by claiming to be
"engineers" yet the next moment they say "but I don't know how to solder"
or even just by their post it's obvious they have no clue and are just
hoping to get "professional courtesy" by claiming to be that engineer.

People didn't tell the guy to get a new tv set because it's simpler, they
told him that because they interpreted his post and realized he couldn't
fix it himself.

One of the few new things I bought in the past decade was a DTV. It was a
great move, I got an LCD set larger than I'd ever had, got the ability to
tune DTV stations, and closed captioning, it takes up way less space and
is nice and light, has multiple inputs for hdmi, and it uses way less
power. And at the time if I'd bought a DTV converter, those were selling
here for about half the amount I paid for the tv set, and I wouldn't have
gotten a nice new set.

Sometimes it makes sense to buy new, because then you actually get
something considerably better, along with a working tv set (if the old set
wasn't working in the first place).

There is a difference between getting old technology working, and getting
current technology working. It made sense to clean that blu-ray player I
found on the sidewalk last year, because it saved money, kept the player
frm landfill, and offered about as much as I'd get if I bought new.

And I really should have dragged home that LCD tv set I found on the
sidewalk downtown last week, because it was probably something simple like
the DVD player not working (or the remote got missing), since people often
do toss things for that reason. Or, it likely was capacitors in the power
supply that needed replacing, like those LCD monitors I've brought home.
One can even point out that an LCD tv set or monitor is way easier to
repair than a CRT set, since the boards are small and readily accessible.
But the set wouldn't fit in my knapsack, I couldn't get the stand off
(time to change phillips screwdrivers) and I had things to do so I
couldn't carry it by hand.

Michael