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ArtistA long-pink-haired woman wearing a multicolour tie-dye kaftan and beige platfom shoes. She is sitting at a desk fiddling with the insides of a personal computer. Many other PCs sit on the desk in various states of repair.
Well, I've worked for a number of dealers, OEM's, and turnkey vendors ever since the 80's when I left teaching (it didn't go with my Aspie personality). I designed a few Apple peripheral cards for a firm in Croydon, then joined a partnership to sell printer cards to other Apple dealers, then worked for a kitchen design company in Morden, then worked for a computer cable company in Croydon (from where I ran Wanderland on their PDP11), and finally (1990) settled with a telephone company in Lewisham ("Press 1 for Enquiries, 2 for Sales, 3 for Accounts, 4 for Technical Support [thats me], 5 for Maintenance. If you don't have a touch tone phone leave a message after the beep.") Anyway I bought a Apple ][ (and later an Apple //e) from the kitchen company, got lent a 286 (and later bought a 486) by the telephone company, bought several PC's in Tottenham Court Road (including a laptop) and PC World in Croydon, and inherited a load of old PC's and power supplies when the boss of the telephone company died in 2008. I retired in 2014 and moved to the East Midlands, and have found both Cex and Cash Converters a useful source of retro PC's, often failed homebrew ones for about £50 each.
What usually goes wrong?
Apart from the mouse and the keyboard (which are easily replaced) the most unreliable part is the floppy drive and the CDROM drive. Rarely does the mobo or the CPU fail. HDD's are somewhere in between, and can fail through being dropped, or by setting the jumpers wrong (making two masters or two slaves). Their contents can be corrupted by viruses, trojans, or just bad cables (causing bad sectors). Luckily nowadays most HDD's are SATA, or have been replace by SSD's. The other rarely-failing item is the power supply, where capacitors can fail (these usually blow the fuse in the plug). Monitors are nowadays flat-screen (though used to be CRT, suffering from screen burn and failing EHT transformers). Personally I use a JVC Smart TV as my monitor, with 2 HDMI and 1 VGA port, connected to a KVM (keyboard-video-mouse) switch, allowing 4 PC's to share 1 keyboard and mouse.
Operating Systems
A mix of MS-Windows NT, 2K, XP, Vista, 7, and 10, plus MS-DOS 5.0, none of which are connected to the Internet (that's what my smart TV is for). Plus my own homebrew OS ::SHE+ILA:: which will get there eventually :)
