Interesting Friday afternoon job on a C203

[EarthKmTech]

Machine lives happily at the back of a multiple machine environment office, hasn't had a single call in 473 days, had ticked over 395,000 pages happily in the background.

Machine asking for fusing unit.

Yeah, nice relaxing way to end the week.

Turn machine off, clean it out, replace the fusing unit and the LCT rollers.

Turn machine on, nothing....

Orange start button and both LED's on scanner ON solid.

double check every connector i touched for bent pins, all ok...

Uh Oh!

MFP boards blown or crusty old original ram has finally died.

Swap the ram sticks around, bank 0 into bank 1 and 1 into 0, bingo, machine starts up but crashes at the ready screen. Clearly the ram stick that was originally in bank 0 has died. Replaced the failed stick with a new one from car stock and bang machine is up and running again perfectly.

Friday afternoon bad luck tried to beat me, and I kicked its ass.. :cool:

[JR2ALTA]

Nice story, and nice car stock. at least you did your job and got screwed.

what's worse is when you decide to take the extra step and smoke appears.

I bitch a lot about Konicas, but it sure seems like there are more board,hdd,ram,navram, firmware-related failures than any other device. I don't understand how at the "circuit level" they can't last, I mean there are 20 year old computers still puttin' along.

[EarthKmTech]

I 100% blame RoHS for the premature failure and short lifespan of modern electronics.

Your dead right that I can still power on a computer made in the 1980s and it will work as well today as it did back then.

Good luck getting that life out of anything made today, unless its military or medical grade (excluded from RoHS)

[kingpd@businessprints.net]

What's rohs

[EarthKmTech]

Restriction of Hazardous Substances Directive - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Restriction_of_Hazardous_Substances_Directive)

[Hansoon]

Don't forget the influence from greedy CEO's pushing engineers to limits and also don't forget that China Man has no interest in producing long lasting products.

If the intention of RoHS is protecting the environment it would be a good idea to increase the life span of technical articles.

A good idea too would be rethinking the whole cartridge crap we have to live with, where a simple single toner bottle would do instead of throwing away whole units full with technical Hoo-Ha only because the toner is used up.

Hans

[kingpd@businessprints.net]

I think we (techs) have some blame or a double edged sword dilemma.

Our jobs depend on shitty machines needing constant maintenance and fixing.

If things were made awesome and like tanks; nobody would make money and customers would stop upgrading to the next piece of shit copier.

However, when you have shitty machines, it starts to make financial sense to quit paying people to fix it and just get another new but still shitty machine.

So then you run into the problems of poor reputation, bad quality, all making it easier for the competitor to get the next contract, even though they're shitty too.

I personally would prefer one excellent design copier made of steel or titanium that would cost a lot but last over 100 years than a plastic pos.

[EarthKmTech]

customers are the real problem,

only the cheapest brands per segment sell in good volume so cheapness in manufacture is paramount.

ask a person if theyd like to spend 5 grand on a machine, such as a c220 etc, it will likely go its entire life of 5 years with perhaps a dozen calls for minor issues and a dozen more for technician consumables calls OR spend 100 grand on a machine with the same performance specifications that will never require a single call out over a 5 year period or require any parts.

I know which one i would choose and it aint the 100k one.

some companies were selling the CF2002, with fiery and a booklet finisher for 40 grand ~10 years ago.. The c220 kicks the living shit out of the cf2002 and somehow its about a fifth of the price, inflation has gone backwards on copiers ;)

[zuojin168]

Don't forget the influence from greedy CEO's pushing engineers to limits and also don't forget that China Man has no interest in producing long lasting products.

If the intention of RoHS is protecting the environment it would be a good idea to increase the life span of technical articles.

A good idea too would be rethinking the whole cartridge crap we have to live with, where a simple single toner bottle would do instead of throwing away whole units full with technical Hoo-Ha only because the toner is used up.

Hans
Yes, Chinese does not produce durable products, but there is few people in China use the original, are used to substitute generic products. Because of cheap price.