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c/electronics-repairersthomasgonzalezthomasgonzalez2mo agoProlific Poster

A repair job from 2012 that still bugs me

Got a call today from a guy who still uses the same Vizio TV I fixed for him over a decade ago. It was a simple bad cap job, maybe took me 45 minutes back then. The thing is, I remember that whole week because three other people brought in the exact same model with the same issue. It was like a weird, specific wave of failures. I charged him $60, which felt fair at the time. Makes me wonder what kind of 'waves' we'll see with today's stuff, where you can't even get a schematic. Anyone else have a weirdly memorable run of identical repairs from back in the day?
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4 Comments
the_claire
the_claire2mo ago
Yeah, and @ross.christopher is right, it's everywhere now. I bet we're gonna see waves of dead power supplies in those cheap streaming sticks in a couple years. They all use the same no-name boards that cook themselves. Or those plastic clips on modern laptop cases that all snap at the same time. You just know a whole generation of devices is gonna fail the same way, and we won't have a diagram to even know where to start.
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ross.christopher
Totally get that, man!
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stella22
stella223d agoMost Upvoted
Those cheap chinese power bricks in streaming sticks, yeah. I used to think a power supply is a power supply, you just plug it in. But last year I had three of those Roku sticks die on me all within a month of each other. The bricks were all warm to the touch even when nothing was plugged in. That changed my mind completely.
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troychen
troychen2mo ago
It's the default response for everything now.
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