This issue has come up before, but I today I was reminded of it and would like to remind others too.
When removing the heat sinks on main boards people, including service technicians, tend to use sharp tools they twist sideways or press against in order to raise up and detach the heat sink from the board.
The result is often direct damage to the extremely tiny tracks around the main processor as shown here:
(click to enlarge, you will need it full size!)
The damage is a little to the right of the middle of the picture, just on the left side of R253.
Two tracks have been cut and will need to be repaired, which, while not a rocket science, is reasonably difficult.
There is an even bigger problem elsewhere though.
It is that people, including service techs, do not usually account for or even consider the odds of THEM damaging a board.
Similar to the situation in the previous article (where a customer, on the way to sue us in court, ended up publicly accusing us for selling them an empty EEPROM despite their own claim of having issues with the TV that would highly unlikely be caused by an EEPROM) this board was sent to us by a customer who ordered and installed an EEPROM from us.
The problem was not in the EEPROM, of course, but on top of the problem we had to deal with this issue and it took us much longer than the usual problem for the simple reason it is unique.
The profit in the TV repair business is in efficiency resolving a problem; every problem can be resolved given enough time or money, the trick is to do it for little time and little money.
This has proven possible only if you know upfront what to look for, not necessarily in terms of specific components, but also in terms of actually knowing the board and its functionality so you can exclude certain portions fast enough and focus on others.
Main boards are proprietary computers, though. We reverse engineer them to figure out how they work.
If and when it comes to isolating portions of the board you KNOW you are going to lose money on it; your only chance to make them up is if the same problem happens again in the future and THEN you can actually solve it quickly, charge reasonably (yet more than the time it has taken you to resolve it this particular time) and thus, over time, pay over your initial investment.
Problems like
Problems like this are unique - just as , for example, damages from stacking boards on top of each other or physical damages in transportation.
They are a sure money losers.
Which should explain why we ask for more money (if we at all agree) to service a board that was tampered with or broken in transportation.
1 comments:
Thanks for discussing this topic. This is totally true as there are many technicians who do not have the care for such unit same as the owner does. Which is why when i need a unit repaired a by technician, i always make i am near them to always monitor their activity. I also do not stop checking them through phone call to check progress. If only most technicians care for their serviced units as if it's their property then it would be so much better.
Thanks for sharing this wonderful topic. Regards from college writing services
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