plav@cup.portal.com (Rick M Plavnicky) (05/23/90)
I have a minor gripe WRT C= Quality Control, concerning my 2 month old A2091. Here's the story, please excuse its length... Last Sunday I bought 2 megs of memory to populate the board. Powered down, popped the board out, installed the chips (even looked at the manual first - never hurts, right? :-), moved the jumper, reassembled, and applied power. No boot. Grey screen. "Maybe a bad chip," I thought. The manual says that if the system no longer boots, chances are there are troubles with the first 512K of expansion. So I open the system up, reach in and move the jumper to zero K, and try powering up again. Boots fine. Now I'm faced with the never-fun chore of figuring out which chips are good and which are bad, and a few calls to the vendor Monday to beef about bad chips... So, as I'm sitting there, turning the A2091 over and over in my hands thinking about the task ahead I see... What's this? A blob of solder across 2 pins in one of the banks of RAM sockets! Look closer. It's in the last 512K. Closely examine the rest. Sure enough, here's a joint in the first 512K that looks like it could be cold... Decision time. Take an iron to it, or take it to the dealer Monday? The iron won, and in a few minutes the system was up and running its RAM test flawlessly. Once I looked (and I guess I should have FIRST) the defective joints were visually quite obvious. Why wasn't this spotted? Are the boards tested at all before shipping? Anybody else have similar problems? This is defect #2 for this system. The first was broken hard drive shock mounts, a problem that has been discussed in this forum before. /* Rick Plavnicky ...!sun!cup.portal.com!plav -or- plav@cup.portal.com */
turing@ucscb.UCSC.EDU (Brad Gulko) (05/28/90)
I had two major problems with C= QA, as well as a number of minor ones involving unreadable disks...... When I got my A2000, I got a green screen on boot up (I think it was a green screen... was quite awhile ago). I popped the motherboard out, and examined all of the pins and found that one of the ram chip pins had been bent on insertion and was only barely making contact. Again, this was an obvious problem that should have been spotted by QA. A few minutes with a soldering iron and everything was fine. The next problem came when I received my 2088 bridge borad. It seemed to work OK but would not connect with any of the PC bus peripherials! Upon examination, I discovered that the PC side pins were covered with this sticky goop. Again this should have been easily spotted by QA. I cleaned off the goop and it worked fine.... -- Brad