Would seem to be a useful thing, and relatively easy to set up with DMS existing resources.
I’m thinking:
What do you think?
Unless there’s a whole lot of interest in this, I’m going to say No.
Second Art on this,
While easy to setup and likely affordable, you would be dedicating space to a tool with very little use to the larger membership of DMS. Most PC trouble shooting is done at the location of the PC in question and the need for a dedicated test bench is really only needed in a pc building production environment or dedicated repair company environment. Not saying it couldn’t be of use to someone, just not of use to enough to dedicate the funds and often more valuable limited space.
It would not be hard to setup but I concur with the others who’ve suggested the tradeoff of space and low use outweigh the benefits. However, there’s two ongoing efforts that help somewhat with the ‘Test PC’ scenario Rich brings up.
One reason for the loaner pegboard in the common room is to make it easier to find the various connectors and power adapters needed for this sort of scenario and others. The pegboard has space for more things if we want to expand on it, particularly power supplies, mice and even keyboards.
The cleanup of the Infra office, when completed, will free up a worktable and shelving so that we can better support testing, troubleshooting and related work for DMS computers. This is only going to be for Infra volunteers but worth mentioning here I think.
Coming out of left field here but could it be a “swiss army knife toolbox” with everything you need to trouble shoot a pc and can be put away when youre done using it? I have old and newer power supplies, cables, floppy drives, cd drives, and more I could donate
Not a bad idea,
The question becomes who takes ownership. Ownership is more than just having a corner to put it. It is maintaining the items in the kit, replacing items that walk away, maintaining it’s availability.
That is the difference between DMS and Your Home Shop. In your home shop, you build the kit, use it once in a blue moon, and return it to the corner it lives in most the year, items break or walk off over a time frame of years and you just replace them when you need them. At DMS, members use the kit and touch it 3 times a month to 3 times a week. At DMS, your kit get the use in one month that it might get in 2 or 3 years at your shop. If you’d replace one or two things a year, DMS would likely replace 4 or 5 items a month.
Without active management, the kit would likely be helpful for a month, then over 2 or 3 months lose items and have things broken, till it is just the stuff no one uses and no one wants to replenish the stuff that is needed.
That is why @artg_dms explains there needs to be a whole lot of interest. The issue isn’t that we couldn’t build a kit once. The issue is we don’t have the interest to maintain it as an offering of DMS.