This Best of All Threads has regained its proper place as the Thread with the most Posts and the most 'hits' of any on this Forum (if you ignore "Stickies" and "CapCom", which by their very nature are bound to have enormous numbers of both).


As I've said before: "Cliffnemo" (Clifford Leach RIP) "builded better than he knew" when he started it in 2008. It has been an evergreen here ever since, rarely lapsing into Page 2 (the Slough of Despond) of "Military Aviation" Forum. Long may this continue.


STOP PRESS.


Total Laptop Failure.


Danny42C will be operating (slowly and awkwardly !) on my daughter's Laptop TFN. Do not expect much !


Happy Easter ! Danny.

RIP, Danny's Laptop. You served him, and this community, well and righteously during your too-brief span of life. May your successor achieve the same greatness you did.

Hello Danny,

I'm so pleased and relieved to hear you're back on track..!

Re your laptop, I know exactly what you mean. My trusty 7 year old XP lappy has the same problem! I need to twiddle the the power plug to get the thing to charge and lately the twiddling required has increased dramatically and become tiresome.
Cunningly, I thought I'd just hard wire the charging cable until I realized half way through the dismantling process the work involved to get the required access to do so. Like you, the time has come to put it to pasture...
Amazingly the device still works minus about 17 screws I didn't replace! :}

Cheers

Octane

Octane (#10465),This is not the spirit that "Made the Empire Great" !


Over the years I've paid enough for extended warranties to buy two new ones. I
intend to get the thing fixed under warranty; but if I can't, local chappie quotes £59 for the job. Cheapest touchscreen laptop is around £500 (which is just about what I paid for this old-timer) We'll soldier on together a while yet !


Danny.

Couldn't agree with you more, Danny!

I remember when my 2 girls were little, and some toy got broken, getting out the tools, and with the assistance of various unguents, spare screws and other sundry "come in handy" bits, getting the said thing working again. After all, that's what Dads do!!

How can the modern child look up to a parent who says, "Just chuck it in the bin and we'll buy a new one"?


However, I must admit defeat the other day. The charger for my battery drill stopped charging. The cable at the plug end looked a bit suspect, so I chopped it off. Bared the end of cables and checked for voltage. Nothing. Had a look at the plug end, and discovered the screws that held the thing together were of a pattern I'd never come across before. After a bit of sawing & filing, I'd managed to construct a tool that would hopefully remove them. Success!

Inside was a little transformer and a few diodes. Checked the output DC. Nothing.

Checked the output from the transformer. Nothing. Sod it, I'm beat!

I do however, have a wee tool to extract non-standard screws, so not all my time was wasted.

I confess that I regard computery (and telephones and well travelled luggage) as Class C Stores = Consumable Items. :(

Needing to wiggle the plug is often a symptom of a dry/broken solder joint on the socket (attached to the motherboard of the laptop). Problem is you more or less have to dismantle the laptop to get to it....lots of screws and gentle persuading of plastic clips required!

Gentlemen !


Thank you all for your interest in my predicament (sans touchscreen I feel I have a leg cut off).


All this is way over my head ! Tuesday morning it's on its way !


Will report progress (don't hold your breath !)


Danny.

Hello Danny,

"This is not the spirit that "Made the Empire Great" !"

In my defense, I have been enduring this problem for about a year!

I had to "twiddle" writing this post.

There is a limit to what one can tolerate, that limit is close to being breached!

What has kept me going is the fact I'm fond of my trusty machine despite its age, it's does all I need and to be honest I'm a bit leery of upgrading to a new device after reading of all the dramas people seem to have with Windows 10?

As andytug points out, complete dismantling of the machine is required to gain access to the rogue section of the motherboard. I have serious doubts the reassembly would be successful. Though I am considering attacking the machine from below with a Dremel. Nothing to lose..!

I shall keep you posted.

Cheers

Octane

Ah! The days of Bodge, Fixit and Grubscrew.....

Over the years the little corner shops full of old TVs, radios and VCRs with "spares and repair" signs in the windows have been disappearing and being replaced with charity shops. Open one day, closed the next, then the windows filling with dust and children gazing into the gloom inside under shaded hands - until an OXfam or Shelter shop appears in its place.

Had one just down the road from me till about 2 years ago, owner was a widower in his 80s, no family, who had nothing else to do so just kept opening his shop every day and struggled on as sales and repairs vanished as VCRs did the same. Died intestate and the windows went the same way. However, just reopened under new ownership; Afghani or some sort of family and still has much of the same type of stock - vacuum cleaner and washing machine parts etc, as well as an eclectic "Open All Hours" stock of brooms, basins pans etc. Just as well, the street already has 7 different charity shops in it.

I bought an antique Bakelite Bush DAC 90 radio ( well antique to me - made in 1946, Danny doubtless bought the same model new with a lifetime warranty just after the war) and needed to get it fettled, so I researched online for a suitable establishment that performed such arcana in the modern day and age. I located one in South London and made an appointment.

Upon arrival it was a large old Victorian terrace house. Having gained entry I was lead to a workshop full of men in their 70s and 80s wearing brown lab coats and working on a variety of valve radios, televisions and other devices. Soldering irons, valves and other unidentifiable components and windings in cardboard boxes with names such as Bush, Decca, Cossor and Pye in fading colours on the labels and piles of manufacturers repair manuals - all of who were able to discuss wisely the history and development of such things as superheterodyne circuits and the mysteries of triode and pentode valves and who sneered at modern new fangled developments such as FM and DAB.

Two weeks later I collected my lovingly restored radio which sits in my study on top a mahogany filing cabinet beside my desk.

Such places do still exist, though in decreasing numbers. I doubt if any such will exist in years to come for imported laptops......

Welcome To The Radio Workshop - Radio WorkshopRadio Workshop | THE UK?s LEADING VINTAGE RADIO REPAIR AND RESTORATION CENTRE

Nice post, ORAC, which reminds me ...

As a child/young teen, my parents 'upgraded' to a Roberts portable and I was given the home's enormous wireless for my bedroom. Sadly not one of the ones illustrated on that website, so no positive ID. But it was getting on for 2 ft wide, in a brown [wood?] cabinet full of glowing valves and with a large semi-circular tuning dial on the front. Ah, the days of 'Hilversum', 'Luxembourg', 'Home Service', 'Light Programme' etc. etc.

The was a socket in the back panel, to which was connected a pair of [WW2?] headphones with chamois earpieces. Young MPN11 would settle into bed, plug in the headset [which then stifled the loudspeaker] and get immersed in the thrills of "Lost ... In ... Space" :)

Hello ORAC,

The problem is that in times gone by, things were built to last and were repairable.
That's why my 1967 Mini (souped up :)) is still on the road.
Modern stuff is designed with a limited lifespan in mind...
The plastic bits on my friends expensive European car are starting to look "tatty" for example...

My 1946 Poona memories, now being mined, include an American radio inside a khaki crackle-painted heavy metal case about 18ins x 12 x 12. Daddy said it was a welfare set which he had obtained from US surplus. It had a tuning dial, a volume knob and another mysteriously labelled BAND: SW, MW, LW. At five years old I was very annoyed when I selected BAND and nothing happened ... it took a while for Daddy to explain that military bands were in scarce supply inside US welfare sets.

Ah, memories, memories ......


Shortly before War, my folk bought a HMV - massive thing (sounds like MPN11's [#10473] radio). Cost £18/17/6 or thereabouts, which was arm + leg then. Had a "Magic Eye", which sounds like the fine tuner on MPN11's.


Took it with me when I went back in the RAF post-war, sat beside me on seat of Bond, weighed a ton ! God knows what happened to it.


Ah the joys of rigging an aerial wire in the garden, and an earthing spike !

Danny
Gosh, that brought back a very long forgotten memory of my Dad and I rigging an aerial (plus ceramic insulators) the length of the garden so that I could get a signal to my crystal set. I was chuffed to pieces when it worked!!
Thank you :)

A mate has taken to repairing and refurbishing old valve radios and amplifiers to keep his mind active in retirement. He recently bought a Murphy radio and complained about the Magic Eye being missing. I'm not certain I'd ever heard of one before although I do have a vague memory of a sort of greenish-yellow light on the front of a radio.
The Magic eye wasn't missing, it was laying in the bottom of the case, and he tells me after fitting new valves and capacitors it works very well.


My granddad worked in a small shop in Watford repairing TVs and radios from the late 40s until he sort of retired at the age of 70 in 1970. I've absolutely no idea how he learnt how to do it, he was a carpenter at Scammell Lorries until the shop owner head-hunted him to change careers.
He supplied all our TVs and radios until he retired, including an old, possibly HMV, valve radio we had for some years.
I was a bit disconcerted on visiting the Science Museum in the very early 60s to see an identical model on display. We were still using ours.
Although I don't remember it - I was very young - apparently the first TV I ever saw, Granddad made. I was told that in typical Granddad style he never finished it to put in a case - it took up three to four feet of the top of the sideboard.

Danny 42C 7 Octane

I had a similar problem with the jack plug to my laptop. The jack was difficult to
fit in the machine. Judicious prodding of the jack with a wooden cocktail stick
removed the crumb, cockroach or whatever, and it now fits properly like as before.

As they say, it is always worth having a poke. http://cdn.pprune.org/images/smilies/evil.gif

Tengah Type
 

Thanks for the tip but I've tried a few different power supplies/ plugs. The problem is definitely within the machine..
As someone has already suggested, it's most likely a dodgy connection on the motherboard..
Still pondering the dremel approach, radical as it may seem...:)

My Dad made our first TV set, out of old airborne radar sets...these used Philips EF50 valves, and that's a story in itself....
The EF50, the tube that helped to win the War
The first programme we saw was the last King's funeral, the picture appearing by magic on a smeary 9" screen. It took several years, and two attempts at cabinet making, before the various chassis were finally contained in a cabinet. Dad's attempt at rivetting the chassis was rapidly replaced by my Aunt Lil, who did a very rapid and professional job of flush rivetting, having spent the War making gun turrets for Lancasters!

We rented a colour TV from Rediffusion in the olden days when I was poor underpaid Sergeant. It was prone to lose the picture when a diode on the power supply board overheated. The clue was in where the smoke came from. A Rediffusion repair man arrived (not tony draper) and being informed by Missus B that the fault was "the diode on the power board" insisted on having a poke around the innards. There was a bang and flash and the poor fellow was thrown across the room. "Are you sure you know what you're doing?" asked Missus B. He fled. Another repair man turned up in the afternoon and changed the diode. :)