the last word

Photography meets digital computer technology. Photography wins -- most of the time.

  • site home
  • blog home
  • galleries
  • contact
  • underwater
  • the bleeding edge
You are here: Home / Technical / On-site service

On-site service

March 6, 2011 By JimK Leave a Comment

If a personal computer is a computer that you have all to yourself, my first personal computer was a Hewlett-Packard 2114, which was assigned to me in 1970 when I was working at hp. It came with a form of onsite service; if anything broke, I’d either swap the new part in myself or call for a service tech.

If a personal computer is a machine that’s designed to be used by one or two people, my first personal computer was an Apple II, which I acquired in 1979. I never thought about what would happen if something broke; luckily, nothing ever did.

In the early eighties I had a procession of IBM PCs. If something broke, I’d fix it myself. By the late eighties, while I used real IBM computers at work, I routinely built the machines I’d use at home. It was fun to do, and it was easy to fix them, since I knew exactly what was in them. With the exception of a couple of Macs, I used homemade computers for most of the nineties.

About the turn of the millennium, I grew bored with computer construction, and would order the pieces and pay a vendor to assemble them. I’d still fix them myself; since they were assembled from industry standard parts, it was easy to get spares. After some flirtations with an Alien and Falcon, five or six years ago, I switched to Dell for desktops and servers. The upside of going with a big company like Dell was that the thermal design of the machines was far better than what I could do myself; the downside was that it was impractical for me to do repairs. Fortunately, Dell offered, and still offers, fast response onsite service at a reasonable price.

I’ve never liked the idea of taking your computer in to a store for repair, and leaving it while it’s being worked on. Aside from the hassle, I’m worried about privacy and integrity of my data. When you have onsite service, you see exactly what the tech is doing, and the machine is never out of your sight.

Of the four vendors whose machines I evaluated for my latest photo editing workstation, only Apple does not offer onsite service. I excluded the Mac Pro early on because I couldn’t get enough memory on a single-processor system, but the Mac servicing arrangements would have concerned me had it been in the running at the end.

← Getting more RAM, part 3 Tech Hall of Shame: Blu-Ray (again) →

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

January 2021
S M T W T F S
 12
3456789
10111213141516
17181920212223
24252627282930
31  
« Dec    

Articles

  • About
    • Patents and papers about color
    • Who am I?
  • How to…
    • Backing up photographic images
    • How to change email providers
  • Lens screening testing
    • Equipment and Software
    • Examples
      • Bad and OK 200-600 at 600
      • Excellent 180-400 zoom
      • Fair 14-30mm zoom
      • Good 100-200 mm MF zoom
      • Good 100-400 zoom
      • Good 100mm lens on P1 P45+
      • Good 120mm MF lens
      • Good 18mm FF lens
      • Good 24-105 mm FF lens
      • Good 24-70 FF zoom
      • Good 35 mm FF lens
      • Good 60 mm lens on IQ3-100
      • Good 63 mm MF lens
      • Good 65 mm FF lens
      • Good 85 mm FF lens
      • Good and bad 25mm FF lenses
      • Good zoom at 24 mm
      • Marginal 18mm lens
      • Marginal 35mm FF lens
      • Mildly problematic 55 mm FF lens
      • OK 16-35mm zoom
      • OK 60mm lens on P1 P45+
      • OK Sony 600mm f/4
      • Pretty good 16-35 FF zoom
      • Pretty good 90mm FF lens
      • Problematic 400 mm FF lens
      • Tilted 20 mm f/1.8 FF lens
      • Tilted 30 mm MF lens
      • Tilted 50 mm FF lens
      • Two 15mm FF lenses
    • Found a problem – now what?
    • Goals for this test
    • Minimum target distances
      • MFT
      • APS-C
      • Full frame
      • Small medium format
    • Printable Siemens Star targets
    • Target size on sensor
      • MFT
      • APS-C
      • Full frame
      • Small medium format
    • Test instructions — postproduction
    • Test instructions — reading the images
    • Test instructions – capture
    • Theory of the test
    • What’s wrong with conventional lens screening?
  • Previsualization heresy
  • Privacy Policy
  • Recommended photographic web sites
  • Using in-camera histograms for ETTR
    • Acknowledgments
    • Why ETTR?
    • Normal in-camera histograms
    • Image processing for in-camera histograms
    • Making the in-camera histogram closely represent the raw histogram
    • Shortcuts to UniWB
    • Preparing for monitor-based UniWB
    • A one-step UniWB procedure
    • The math behind the one-step method
    • Iteration using Newton’s Method

Category List

Recent Comments

  • Robert Frangioso on Leica 280/4 Apo-Telyt R on GFX 50R in infrared
  • Robert Frangioso on Why so few posts?
  • Ken on Noise reduction and downsampling
  • Robert Kuechle on Chronography video up
  • JimK on Leica 90/2 Apo-Summicron ASPH-M on GFX 50S
  • DanB on Leica 90/2 Apo-Summicron ASPH-M on GFX 50S
  • gideon on How fast is the Sony a7RIV silent shutter?
  • JimK on How fast is the Sony a7RIV silent shutter?
  • Gideon on How fast is the Sony a7RIV silent shutter?
  • JimK on How fast is the Sony a7RIV silent shutter?

Archives

Unless otherwise noted, all images copyright Jim Kasson.