Fried Mini PC and the Curse of Compactness

Yesterday I wrote about how designs seem to have stagnated in recent years.

Yeah, kind of "old man yells at clouds".

But hear me out!

You see that mini pc up there? I love my mini pcs ... while they are working.

They are good for use as development machines, retro gaming, general word processing/browsing, NAS, home automation, and lots more.

The problem comes when you want to diagnose or repair them, because everything is made so compact and integrated that when anything fails you can't just swap discrete parts out as easily as the big desktop machines of the 'olden days' (1990s/2000s).

These are more modular than many, to be fair, having 2x slots for memory (most are single slot to reduce height and cost) and slot and sockets for M.2/SSD, even wifi.

You can see how much is all on the board though, which means when something goes wrong you have to swap the entire motherboard.

I think I fried this by drawing too much power through the USB :(

And the company does not sell just the motherboard.

People complain about Apple - rightly - but many, many other companies are just as bad or worse.

When I contacted Beelink they couldn't help me because my PC was out of warranty, and your high street repair shops are as stuck as I am because 99% of them don't do any soldering or component level repairs as it is just not worth it for what they can charge.

It's not like while you wait service for a screen replacement or battery swap.

Customers don't want to pay their hourly rate to find the component or chip that fried only to be told they can't get the parts to replace them anyway.

I can't even buy a "for parts or repair" on ebay as they likely have already scavenged the working and accessible parts ...

So now I need to get a new 9v battery for my multimeter and have a dig around to see if I can find a bad capacitor or something simple, otherwise I might see if anyone has older models at discount.