[rescue] Repairing Sun Exx00 Node Boards

[Michael Parson]

On Thu, Jan 12, 2006 at 11:14:54AM -0800, Devin L. Ganger wrote:
> on 1/12/2006 9:22 AM Chad McAuley wrote:
>> On 1/11/06, velociraptor <velociraptor at gmail.com>wrote:
>
>>> I can't tell you how much I miss not being able to just run down to
>>> Fry's to get what I want.  Metro DC area is such a tech wasteland--
>>> MicroCenter and CompUSA just don't cut it.
>
>> All the good stuff I hear about Fry's makes me wish there was one
>> even remotely close by[0].  MicroCenter and CompUSA are certainly
>> better than the other options, but you're right; they just don't cut
>> it for some things.  And there aren't really any local places around
>> here that are decent either[1], which is a shame since I'd be willing
>> to pay the "I get it now" tax and pick stuff up locally rather than
>> having to order from Newegg/ZipZoomFly/MWave/etc.
>
> I've not been impressed with Fry's any time I've gone, both to the
> relatively new one here in the Seattle area and to the Wilsonville
> location just south of Portland, OR. The staff are rude and ignorant,
> they never carry enough stock on hand for their special deals by
> even the most pessimistic standard, returns are a nightmare, and the
> idiot shoppers who throng there make the store (and the parking lot)
> a hazard to navigate. And don't even get me started about advertising
> a "final" price that depends on 30 million mail-in rebates, most of
> which you will never actually see even if you step through all the
> paperwork hoops.

Must be the area.  Yes, the advertised specials can be pretty special,
but I've never had any problems getting the rebates, they just take
some time.  I rarely deal with the staff there for technical questions,
just to get things that you can only get by talking to them, like RAM,
CPUs, etc.  They do tend to be out of stock on things tinkerers might be
looking for, but I've got a couple of other stores for that stuff to try
as well.

I have *never* had a problem with returning things, and yes, I have
returned quite a few things there, for various reasons.  Based on the
number of things on the shelves with that little white sticker on them,
I'd guess lots of other people don't seem to have a problem returning
things either.

The idiots in the aisles?  Not much you can do about that.  I try to
ignore them, but when I do catch some of the helpful suggestions from
one shopper to another, I might step in if I hear something that's just
too far out of reality.

I'm in Austin and have only dealt with our local store.

> Feh. Give me mail order any time; even factoring in shipping, I can
> show hard savings every time. I save visits to stores for when I have
> an emergency and can't wait for overnight or 2-day.
>
> In the good news category, I finally found a taker for my old
> Sparcbook 3gx laptop; I'm trading it straight across with a friend for
> an Ultra 5.  Yeah, I know, an Ultra 5, but this at least allows me to
> start messing around with Solaris 10. And since he won't be running
> Solaris 7 on it, that gives me my Tadpole copy of Solaris 7 to find a
> new home for.

NetBSD is getting closer and closer to being fully-functional on
Sparcbook 3 hardware.  I've got PCMCIA and wscons in the (oldish)
-current I'm currently running, supposedly X works (in 8bit mode), but
I've not been able to get it going yet.

-- 
Michael Parson
mparson at bl.org