jet@karazm.math.uh.edu (J. Eric Townsend) (09/11/90)
In article <1410001@hp-vcd.HP.COM> johne@hp-vcd.HP.COM (John Eaton) writes: >With some of the early micros it >was SOP to clean the leads of all socketed IC's whenever the system started >to flake out. Was there ever any real field-proof that gold-edge contacts are better than <x>-edged contacts? I remember it used to be a big deal, but I haven't heard much about it recently. What about flat-pack socketed chips (don't know what they're called, but the Amiga uses it for a chip)? Are these less likely to corrode their way to failure? Some anecdotes (like anyone cares :-): I had a roommate (hi Phaed) who, as a monthly ritual, took apart his Radio Shack CoCoII and cleaned every cardedge and contact. If he ever skipped a month, there was an inevitable failure of some item on the bus. When the Atari ST first came out, a common "debugging process" when an ST was on the fritz was to unplug any peripheral devices and drop the unit onto a table from about 6". This was to reset the chips. (I watched a friend do this while on the phone to an Atari support person. It was done at the Atari-dood's direction.) Just last week, a friend of mine had a PC's Limited XT go out of whack. We called Dell (the current owner/name of PC's Limited) customer support (on a 5 year old machine :-) and one of the first things the support tech said to do was clean all of the card edges with an eraser. (He didn't say to clean the eraser first, but we did that anyway. :-) follow-ups to alt.folklore.computers. -- J. Eric Townsend -- University of Houston Dept. of Mathematics (713) 749-2120 Internet: jet@uh.edu Bitnet: jet@UHOU Skate UNIX(r)