[WEB4LIB] Re: Chip creep and power surges

[Johnson Darryl]

'Chip Creep' was more of a problem with older PCs, in which many chips were
simply inserted into sockets. In modern PCs, many of the chips are now
either soldered into place, or, in the case of CPUs, are held in place by
retainers of one kind or another.

Back in the early 80s, when memory consisted or rows and rows or 64K RAM
chips inserted into sockets, I would regularly open the PC and blow out the
dust, followed by pressing down on each of these socketed chips, one after
the other. In many cases, you could feel (and sometime hear) the chips being
settled firmly back into their sockets again. And not only memory chips, but
BIOS chips and many other support chips, on the motherboard and on cards,
were inserted into sockets where they would, over time, work loose.

The first line of attack when a PC started displaying erratic behaviour, was
opening it up and resetting the chips, followed by a utility to check the
memory chips. Ah, the good old days! I think I still have a few plastic
tubes of 64K RAM chips hiding in the darker recesses of my file cabinets....

--
    Darryl Johnson                    Darryl.Johnson at nlc-bnc.ca
    ITS, User Support
    National Library of Canada
 

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Walt_Crawford at notes.rlg.org [mailto:Walt_Crawford at notes.rlg.org]
> Sent: Thursday, August 31, 2000 11:01 AM
> To: Multiple recipients of list
> Subject: [WEB4LIB] Re: Chip creep and power surges
> 
> 
> 
> >May I ask David (or anyone else) to explain
> >what "chip creep" means?  This is a new one for me.  Thanks!
> 
> David may have a subtler answer, but (theoretically) thermal 
> changes in the
> PC's internal environment could cause chips to creep out of 
> their sockets.
> It's true enough that the largest thermal change in a PC's 
> environment, in
> most office buildings/libraries at least, is probably when 
> it's warming up.
> 
> Let's just say that I've never seen one of the major PC 
> magazines report on
> the Dangers of Chip Creep: possible, but not a major issue. 
> Again, maybe
> over 15-25 years, or if you're going through power cycles 
> several times a
> day, but...
> 

<snip>