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trash palace creates ewaste

PostPosted: Tue Jan 01, 2013 1:40 pm
by matsondawson
If you've ever been to trash palace in Porirua you may have noticed that the over priced laptops have no power supplies.
Simply because they cannot sell untested electronics because of the law, the power supplies are dumped this making the laptops actually useless.

Re: trash palace creates ewaste

PostPosted: Tue Jan 01, 2013 4:01 pm
by Gibsaw
Idiots. They just need to sell them as parts.

Re: trash palace creates ewaste

PostPosted: Tue Jan 01, 2013 9:23 pm
by SpidersWeb
I wondered why I could never find matching PSUs in their bins.

I've grabbed a few, each visit I would grab one or two just for fun ($25 for a few hours entertainment) but targeted models with power supply requirements I already had at home or the Toshiba's (most of which took a figure-8 mains cable). About half of them worked, although I suspect what is left now is mostly junk - e.g. missing batteries or damaged or too new to be interesting.

Spotted a kid leaving yesterday with two Xbox 360's for $20 total, wish I'd spotted those, hot air gun and a little love....

Edit: oh and found 5.25" and 3.5" diskette boxes in the office section by the couches, damn handy

Re: trash palace creates ewaste

PostPosted: Tue Jan 01, 2013 9:25 pm
by Gibsaw
What do you mean "hot air gun"?

Is there a known fault/fix?

Re: trash palace creates ewaste

PostPosted: Tue Jan 01, 2013 9:40 pm
by acsi
Xbox 360's are notorious for RROD (Red ring of death) or in the case of my spare one Green ring of death. The main recommended fix is too heat the board so that the broken solder contacts remake. This is either done in the oven or via heat gun.
The other fix is too remove the heat sink and increase the pressure to remake the broken contacts.

Also the laser unit's die easily. Unfortunately the Drives are coded to the motherboard so you either need to program the code into the replacement drive or replace the laser unit. I just finished replacing the laser unit in my main Xbox 360 for the second time tonight (previous replacement lasted about a year).

As for trash palace why don't they just cut the plug off? That's all they need to do to sell the PSU's legally and untested as it puts the responsibility onto the person who puts a replacement plug on.

Re: trash palace creates ewaste

PostPosted: Wed Jan 02, 2013 1:15 am
by Carcenomy
Gibsaw wrote:What do you mean "hot air gun"?

Is there a known fault/fix?

BGA issues. More or less the same fault you encounter with white iBooks, PlayStation 3s (yellow light of death on those), HP laptops using ATI chipsets... they run a little hotter than anticipated, a ball lifts and bam, you now need to either harass the board with heat to get it to reseat or more correctly, reball the chip in question. One needs a hot air gun, the other a BGA reballing station. Not such a problem on newer gear but crikey, five years ago had you invested in a BGA reballing station there would have been a tidy profit in repairing boards. To this day an HP board to suit a Touchsmart tx2 convertible is around $1k new, that's not far off the price of the station...

And I know your pain on the drives asci. I just inherited a PS3, boots but no video. Guy had swapped the hard drive and updated the firmware to see if that'd help and made it all worse. Turns out the Bluray drive had been replaced so of course now it doesn't match the board and the machine has essentially locked out. So unless the hacking community come up with a method to downgrade from 4.31, the unit is now a rather fetching doorstop.

Re: trash palace creates ewaste

PostPosted: Wed Jan 02, 2013 6:24 pm
by Gibsaw
There is a method that involves deliberately "bricking" the boot and getting into a service menu. Haven't tried it.

Re: trash palace creates ewaste

PostPosted: Wed Jan 02, 2013 7:37 pm
by acsi
It would seem that the manufacturers are into creating e-waste as well. They deliberately make it too expensive and hard to fix these machines in the hope that you will go out and buy another one due to the money you've already invested in hardware and software.

It can be extremely frustrating not only because of the hassle of having to repair or get them repaired but just the waste generated from cheaply manufactured parts which are designed to fail.

And then to top it all off you have laws in place to make it difficult to sell the faulty units which is why trash palace dump theirs rather than cut the plug off and sell as parts.

Re: trash palace creates ewaste

PostPosted: Wed Jan 02, 2013 10:54 pm
by Carcenomy
Perhaps it's just me, but the BGA issues we've been befouled with in the current generation (which will catch up with our vintage community one day or the other) also stems back to the requirement for modern equipment to be RoHS compliant... lead free, heat cycling, not good. All this on the back of the bad cap generation of the early 2000s... sometimes repairing vintage computers seems like a walk in the park by comparison.