Erstellt am: 28. 4. 2010 - 12:43 Uhr

Today's Webtip: Fix it!

tired of trashing your gadgets? Too frugal to have it fixed? You could always try to do it yourself...

One of the more frustrating things about the global gear craze is the fact that most electronic gadgets are impossible to repair. It might be physically possible, but financially it rarely pays off. If you can find someone else who will do it, that is.

Of course, that is also a certain advantage. Playing around with expensive gear as a kid usually included a massive financial risk. When a VCR cost $1000 dollars, a $500 repair made sense. If my repair attempts turned that into an $800 bill, well, there were consequences.

So when things are cheaper to replace than repair, trying to fix them and failing is also cheaper. Mostly.

Anyway, if you want to try to fix it (whatever that might be) yourself, www.iFixit.com would be a good place to start. They have heaps of well written and illustrated guides to the gear you might need to fix.

David Dempsey

And if you don't have anything that's broken, and just want to learn some basic skills, well, it's a perfect chance to save yourself from experiments gone wrong.