Today I watched a video on linus tech tips that made me sad, and then angry. Linus "fixed" his water soaked laptop. I began to realize he and his crew seemed like amateurs! It was one of those "Im going to use a fan and some rice not try anything else and throw it away if it does not magically work repairs"! He didn't even reseat the cpu! I've recovered plenty of electronics from complete water submersion. And 90% of the time if it doesnt work after drying the only circuits damaged are the ones that deliver power. What was with the surprise that it resumed with apps open? Maybe because it was a dell and as we all know too well dell products are horrible. But of course I would hope he would know that if the computer went into sleep all the temporary files were backed up on the local disk and thus he could pop it into an identical machine and all would be fine in fact the applications would still be running! My local pc repair shop made money after loosing almost everything by buying dead gpu's off ebay, reflowing, replacing all caps and mosfets. 90% of the dead gtx 780's were fixed with little soldering skill. Their whole reflowing setup could be replaced by a magnetic arm, long tweasers, lots of fluxes and a fixed mount heat gun with temperature gauge and light dimmer to controll voltage. Why do so many people treat electronics as irreparable if rice or hitting it doesn't do anything? The only time I give up is if it costs more to fix than its worth! Im sorry but I really expect some one who is suppose to be a professional like Linus to actually be of a similar veiwpoint. I suppose that ended when he turned his channel into a little to no actual content advertisers wet dream!
Why is this wasting time? And explain why does time equal money, are you constantly spending your time with the aim of making money?
I agree with OP, but you need to have the skill and tools to do these things or some avenue that can help you with it. Nevertheless, it would make things a lot more sustainable if people didn't think that time is money like this guy and swap out something that is repairable for something new immediately.
Definitely right, especially for someone in the field of computer that gets paid to use it, you should at least know how to recover a pc from scenarios like that and not just do the magic rice fix which is usually bulls**t. A computer can actually function while submerged in de-ionized water. The more you know about a computer, the better at that job you will be. Maybe it won't be directly affecting your job but in a scenario that will eventually happen like spilling coffee on your laptop or having a kid drop their glass on your computer or whatever a scenario may be, it will save your ass!
@PV
Nice rant.
You do realise that Linus "was" a sales representative for NCIX. He is merely a hardware enthusiast who knows a little about over-clocking and how to use a box-cutter- he's not an electronic engineer, nor has he ever pretended to be.
Some engineers need to make a tech channel. the depth of the content would be so nice. we need real nerds to run the channels!
There's a few around.
I watch EEVBlog
If youcan get past the unusual sounding voice, you might find some stuff that interests you.
Ya took me a while to get over the accent. been some times when I am taking knowledge in and sometimes when i am screaming at the screen telling it that its wrong!
I agree, most people just take something that's damaged and go, "Well it's broke let's buy something new since we have so much money!" Sadly this seems to be the mentality of the USA. It does come to a point, especially in a corporate environment where the time to fix something is costing them more then replacing the said item. (You can always go back to that one though for spare parts or a hot spare!) Like you said Vultan, only time I give up on something is if it costs more to fix then to buy a replacement, like most printers and cars.
I can say I agree with you about Dells being crap. All I've owned for laptops is the Dell brand. It was my first, second, and third laptops over the course of ~13 years. If you buy a 300 buck laptop you're going to get what you paid for. Only ever had a hard drive fail in one of them and that's probably because it was going everywhere with me.
man , i give up on this blog post.
Someone should make a complete tutorial on how to fix a dead graphics card
A lot of people like me assume that if a piece of electronics doesn't recover after carefully getting rid of all the liquid and maybe washing off all the beer residue, it must have a fried component due to the liquid short-circuiting something.
The best advice I know of is to cut all power as soon as possible, take it apart, if possible and seriously give it enough time to dry out. That actually worked in a lot of cases, so it's not all bad.
Anything beyond that, in my experience, requires a good understanding of electronics, a soldering iron and an up-to date schematic of what all the parts are doing.
A lot of the time, when something breaks, it's a guild-free excuse to buy an upgrade. I was hoping for my shoddy printer to die for so long, I gave up and just gave it away. "Feeding the bloody thing with more ink was not a crime against humanity I was willing to commit to any further".
1. Not everyone has the skill set or confidence to do their own repairs.
2. Not everyone has the time to do it.
3. Your post comes off as quite condescending. Just because someone isn't capable of doing their own repairs of electronics does not make them any less intelligent or smart. It is merely not their area of expertise and nor would I expect everybody and their mother to be an electrical engineer tier repairer of electronics.
4. Linus is smarter than you seem to be giving him credit for. Granted, I do think he has become more arrogant since the major success of his channel/company but if you go back and watch some of his older and nerdier videos you'll see he does know more than you might think.
I've often got an open option of doing some overtime. When dealing with unappealing tasks that I'm not an expert with, I often literally do the calculation of how much time I'm wasting, compared with the amount I'm saving and the amount I could've earned putting the extra hours in at work. That sort of puts a price tag on my spare time too.
I understand that not everyone has the confidence, skill or time to do repairs but clearly linus does. Granted I may not understand the whole confidence thing. Ill do anything I want and I do not back down from the fear of the unknown. I did not say one single thing about his intelligence or how smart he was, thats just what you believe I think. The post was more that I disagree with society's view on electronics being so disposable and magically working or magically broken and I would expect most "techies" to agree. I do not expect linus to be an electrical engineer but I do expect him to be more than just a show boy for all the oems that want to advertise. He once made really good content but its all gone to crap in my opinion. I know exactly what Linus's point of knowledge is, and I watch many of his videos. He just doesn't share the sort of obsession over the details that engineers and hobbyists alike do! As always there is a language barrier while using verbal communication versus text based communication. I wish I could rephrase my post better to make you understand.
Well unless you have a 24/7 pay as you go job time isnt money and plus its much better if you can try to repair something instead of sitting on a couch watching tv like most people do. Just imagine how much more knowledge the world would have if we spent 5 hrs a day working on projects rather than starring at pixels! And you ask about the 5 hrs estimate? I just took a look ad my mother father step father and step mother. about 5 hrs a day each wasted!
Yup, own your own business and see how focused you stay on any one thing.
If I make $300 /hr (I don't, but if I did) it would be a waste of money to try and fix a $900 laptop if it takes more than 3 hours to fix it. It's called opportunity cost. Back when I made bigger money (low 6-figures) I gave away a lot of things that just weren't worth my time to tinker with. However, now I'm poor (relatively speaking), so it would take several days before trying to fix something like that became more effort than it's worth.
In fact, I do some PC work on the side and people often abandon things that will cost too much to repair, even at my "meager" labor rates ($50-60 /hr depending on what it is), so I fix the items and flip them.
Linus makes more money doing videos than he would fixing PCs, that's just his thing, so it makes sense to me.
He's one of the hardest working people on Youtube. He literally works 14-16 hours a day, 6 days a week, sleeps 5-6 hours a night, and then spends whatever other time he has with his family. The guy is a hardcore workaholic and doesn't have much "spare time"... he bought a $1000 electric skateboard just to save 10 minutes off his walk to the gym.
your leisure time cost money... it is worth something to you.
in economics this is called an opportunity cost.
anyway, yeah, people give up to easily in everything. learning how to use technology (and how it works), sports, and other skills.
however, linus did manage to make his laptop work, so i dunno what else you would have expected from him.
Just thinking, I have always tried to keep a weather eye on cost vs worth for all of my friends and customers machines. Some are so old and buggy that it is not worth my time to spend more than 2 hours diagnosing and repairing the said machines. before I recommend a new machine, or at least throw new components into the case or chassis and keep it as a sleeper...or back up all the hard drives data and charge them for time and usb.
Most times I can repair water damaged systems, Then there are the ones that just cannot be repaired, save what you can and chuck the rest.