Workshops

1. Background Report: Age against the machine ... (by Dirk Wenk)

Or: When Time's winged chariot runs over your Soft- and Hardware...

Well, this is something they don't know about in the land of PeeCee: An old computer and the problems that go with it, ranging from a leaking clock battery to total standstill!

Luckily the Amiga has not quite reached the stage of total standstill. However, the first signs of senile decay are appearing, regardless of the power of your system! Again and again in fora and mailing lists you will hear cries for help: e.g. the clock does not show the right time anymore. Commonly, the battery has leaked, particularly on the A4000. It's easy enough to get a replacement, but you had better have a deft touch with a soldering iron. And no one wants to send their computer for an expensive repair just because of the clock! ... or are you that rich?

Also common are reports of breakdowns due to oxidation or loosening of a component. Ok, a loosened component is easily fixed, but what do you do with oxidation? Or the other way around, how do you know that the reason is oxidation and not a faulty board or similar? What do you conclude from graphic trash on the screen but no guru, or an unexpected Enforcer alert? Followed by failed data transfer from the graphics board?

To give an example that has happened to me: inexplicable graphic faults and complete dropouts made me think my graphics board was giving up the ghost. Luckily it was a false alarm! After I had gone over the complete configuration of my machine, to see if any patch or program or even a mis-setting of the graphics driver might be responsible, there finally remained only one cause, a faulty graphics board.

I bit the bullet and dismantled the board to send it in for a repair (unfortunately the warranty had expired long since), when the contact pins of my board (a Picasso 4) attracted my attention. They were not silver coloured any more but grey-greenish. A bad sign, but a glimpse of hope! After cleaning the contact surfaces with Contact Spray and subsequent reinstallation of the board the system ran without any flaws. I had just got lucky (unlike the board repairers)!

But how many other users have had something similar happen? And how many graphics boards, SCSI controllers, or other extensions were junked or sent for repair because some inexplicable bug had occurred? I'd say quite a few!

If you're really unlucky, something in your computer really will become defective. I speak from experience, no make that plural. Computer just crashes, or displays an error message like "Ramlib Error" or "Freeing Memory Error" etc. A test run with a memory testprog confirmed the worst: one address on a memory chip was defective. Luckily there are progs for the Amiga to lock out those broken memory addresses to stop programs saving their valuable data at that place.

But it ain't that simple: some RAM bugs appear only after some operating time and when the chip has warmed up. So you know which memory address is defective, but not in which chip or memory module! This requires lots of testing!

You may think you can open the computer and check each module. You won't find it that simple, because

It was no problem to test the memory, but of course it behaved perfectly. Only after several hours testing was there a result. And I was not having a good day, because I found the replacement memory chip had a buggy module as well. ARGGGGGGGGGH!

Ok, that has to be as bad as it gets, right? Oh no. There's always the chance you'll lose the lot.... there can't be many users out there who haven't done this one. You have valuable data on your harddisk, e.g. self-coded programs, graphics, text document etc. and what happens? Your Amiga crashes and takes with it the harddisk!

After reboot you are greeted with a lovely message like "Disk invalid", "Checksum error" or, even worse, "Not a DOS disk"! Mostly this occurs when the last backup was made ages ago. Of course the program to salve harddisks was on the dead harddisk. But even if you have the salve program on a diskette it does not mean that you can get the data back.

Luckily this situation is less frequent thanks to file systems like AFS, PFS, SFS and others. But the danger remains!

But what, you politely request, has this to do with ageing computers? Everyone know harddisks tend to die at the most inconvenient moment. Dear reader, I only wanted to clarify the pains that a loss of data might inflict! And data is not only stored on harddisks...

What about ... all your old 3.5" DD diskettes? They don't crash quite as spectacularly but can you rely on them? How long should they hold their data? Mmmmh? Don't know? I'll tell you: approximately 10 years. The fruit of experience, because there are Amiga diskettes older than 10 years all over the place, especially game diskettes. Diskette data just vanishes after this time! More and more you hear on your fave mailing list "Need disk number 3 of game xyz, because disk is defective!".

Confucius say: man who doesn't save favourite games every ten summers on a safety disk wins empty disk with nice label.

Ok, you can download more and more of those old games legally from sites on the Internet, but unfortunately most of them are cracked versions. Your original disk deserves better, and you don't want to be greeted by a crackers intro ... :(.

Well, at least you're safe with CD-ROMs I hear you say - data on a CD-ROM theoretically doesn't disappear at all. Sad fool! Not all CDs were created equal! Too much sunlight is said to be harmful for the sensitive 12x rewriteable CDs.

But, you argue, the technology of the future will solve the problem. I'm not so sure we aren't digging ourselves an even bigger hole.

Look at the trend towards handheld biological displays, which are super lightweight, use minimum power, but their lifespan is approx. 5 years. Or the tendency to overclock computer processors as standard, or are even design them for a short lifetime - well, why not, since every 6 months the bar is raised again. Do processors, which are running with at more than 1 GHz and are transmitting strongly in the wireless range, make any sense? I don't think so ...

Overclocking will give way to the multi-processor system. Or better, to a quantum computer! Or the positronic computer, which computes in negative time ... but what if we set off a singularity?!? Well, where does the Amiga fit in there, what the future offer us computer geriatrics ;)

So I can only offer one last piece of advice: "Don't hit too hard on the keys of your keyboard, because the plastics softener is quietly vaporizing every day, making the keys more brittle and easier to break..." ;).

Dirk (Wax) Wenk <dw@teleservice.com>