"John Robertson" wrote in message
...
Well, in my field (arcade game repairs - video, pinball, etc.) we (the
industry) used to trouble shoot monitors looking for the exact problem.
Then some lazy tech started simply replacing all the electrolytic
capacitors in the monitors - and the service rate went from a few monitors
a day to five or more. In 90% of the cases replacing the caps and the HOT
(and fuse) fixed most problems, changing the caps, HOT and LOPT/Flyback
fixed most of the rest. Leaving 5% as dogs that one could spend a day on -
if the customer thought it was worth the money.


As always there are many ways to attack a problem. If equipment has a
history of some part or parts failing , look at that first. Especially if
it is easy to replace those parts and they do not cost very much. Then if
it still does not work go on to other methods.
At work we had some equipment that 99.9% of the time it was one of two
things, About 80% was a relay, the other large percentage was a circuit
board that we did not repair in house, but changed out. The relay was easy
as it just plugged in. Took about 5 seconds to change. The board took about
30 minuits to change. For the ones that knew the equipment would take one
voltage reading before changing the relay, for ones that did not know the
equipment and called some one they were told to change the relay.

For something like radios ( I repaired the CB radios back when they cost
around $ 200 and up ) I used the devide by two method if nothing stood out
at first glance. Start about half way and inject a signal or listen for a
signal. From that point go about half way to the end and so on.