Fortsätt till huvudinnehåll

Laptop computer failures - blame the EU?

I got a three year old IBM Thinkpad computer for a friend and it packed up after a few months. It is not entirely dead, but the fault is with the display, which sometimes works and sometimes does not. Apparently it is a widespread problem both with Thinkpads and Apple Mac laptops. The Graphics Processor Unit, a surface-mounted chip, becomes detached from the motherboard due to a combination of failure of the soldered joints and flexing of the motherboard.

It turns out that the root cause of the problem is the use of lead-free solder, as required by the EU's Restriction of Hazardous Substances Directive, which came into force in 2003.

The lead/tin alloys used in traditional solder have peculiar properties which is why they have long been used for making joints in electrical, electronic and plumbing work. The physical chemistry of this is explained here

Lead is of course extremely toxic and there are problems associated with both the extraction and manufacture of lead and lead products, and with their disposal at the end of their useful life. But if the alternatives result in a short-lived product, that is not environmentally friendly either.

It looks as if the legislation has been promoted by politicians and civil servants who do not know what they talking about as they do not understand the science.

The way round the problem is not to ban lead but to ensure effective re-use and end of lifecycle recovery. One of the issues affecting the life of computers is the production of new software which makes ever more stringent demands on the hardware, which, assuming it is of sound manufacture, is discarded only part of the way through its useful life, which is typically about twelve years. This has been the root cause of the mountain of electronic scrap. For the individual, this is good news as serviceable computers are available at no cost. If they are fitted with a new hard disc and the Linux operating system and software are installed, they will do everything that most people use their computers for. But it has been bad news for the environment.

In this light, surely what is needed are directives on software efficiency and the recycling of electronic scrap?

The absurdity of it is that the amount of lead used in electronic equipment is tiny compared with the amount used in car batteries and buildings, for which there is no effective substitute.

Should you have a dead laptop which has stopped working due to failure of the soldering under the GPU, you may be able to resuscitate it. There is a lot of discussion of the matter on the internet. It can be temporarily cured by putting something under the chip to force it back into contact. A risky but effective procedure is to re-flow the solder, which will effect a long term cure.

Hopefully the manufacturers might come up with a solution, but it is not a simple matter and they should have been given the opportunity to do this before the legislation came into effect. As it is, thousands of consumers have been saddled with computers that have to be thrown away after a short life.

Kommentarer

Populära inlägg i den här bloggen

The dreadfulness of British governance

I wrote to my MP on two entirely separate issues recently. The first was to do with the replacement for the Inter City 125 train, which at £2.6 million per vehicle, is twice as expensive as it ought to be. The second concerned the benefits of a switch from business rate and Council Tax to a tax based on site values. In both cases, the replies were full of spurious, unsubstantiated assertions and completely flawed arguments. This is typical. You will not get an iota of sense from the government on any area of public policy at all - finance, economics, trade and employment, agriculture, housing, health, transport, energy. All junk. If you write to your MP you will invariably receive answers that are an insult to your intelligence, no matter what subject you are writing about. Of course they cannot understand statistics. They are innumerate. Whitehall is staffed with idiots with a high IQ. Look at their IT projects. And mind your purse, they will have that too.

How much more will the British tolerate?

The British are phlegmatic, tolerant and slow to rouse. Thus there was no great reaction after the terrorist attack in July 2005. The murder of Lee Rigby created a sense of outrage, but nothing more, since it appeared to be an isolated incident. Two serious incidents within a fortnight are another matter. Since the first major terrorist incident in 2001, authority has tried to persuade the public that Islam is a religion of peace, that these were isolated events, or the actions of deranged "lone wolves", having nothing to do with Islam, or to reassure that the chances of being killed in a terrorist attack were infinitesimally small. These assurances are are beginning to wear thin. They no longer convince. If government does not act effectively, people will take the law into their own hands. What, however, would effective action look like? What sort of effective action would not amount to rough justice for a lot of innocent people? Given the difficulties of keeping large n...

Battery trains fool’s gold

A piece by the railway news video Green Signals recently reported the fast charging trials for battery operated electric trains on the West Ealing to Greenford branch, in west London. In a comment under the video, I described the project as technological overkill, bearing in mind that before dieselisation in the 1960s it was worked by the tiny steam locomotives of the Great Western 1400 class, a 1932 design based on an 1870s design. The money that has been spent on the experiment would have paid for a small fleet of the old things. Elsewhere in the comments, I was critical of the 800 series trains. This produced a response from the makers of the video, as follows. “I may be grasping at straws here but I am guessing you don't like 8xx series trains all that much and rather wish we still had Kings, Castles and (for the branches) 14xx's. Fair? ” My reply was as follows... Yes you are grasping at straws. The model for long distance stock is the class 180, which is a 23 metre veh...