#: 14059 S1/General Interest
    23-Jan-92  23:33:29
Sb: #14046-Death of a CoCo3 II
Fm: Erich Schulman 75140,3175
To: Ian Hodgson 72177,1762 (X)

I do have a service manual for the CoCo3 and I do have an analog vom (20000
ohms per volt).  I do have an oscilloscope too but it's an all-tube scope (EICO
460) from 1961 and I never managed to get it back to original specs.  About 85%
there.  I think I need to replace one of the tubes and I can't find most of its
tubes.  On my CoCo3, it seems fixing one problem ends up making that problem
worse and then a new one comes my way.  And it seems unlikely to me that
getting another CoCo3 would not just give me more of the same.  At least with a
pc I won't have to search far and wide and endure weeks of down time when a
part goes bad.  Installing the 512K was torturous the first time and every
subsequent time.  Do I want to go through that time and again all over?  It
took several toll calls to a technician before I could get my hard drive
working and then it was slow.  The scsi47 drivers only wiped out the whole disk
and left it incorrectly formatted. If I stay with my CoCo3 I now know I will
never realize half the hard drive performance I paid dearly for.  And then the
Slot Pak III.  Marty Goodman informed me that thing has a tendency to self
destruct.  Do I want to drop $180 a year on Slot Pak III's?  And of course DOS
will never be exactly like OS-9, but who said it was even intended to be.  My
CoCo1 has proved very dependable.  But I dropped hundreds of dollars and tens
of hours of work on the CoCo3 and then it dies after I had it a mere 51 weeks.