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New (to me) 1980 Volvo 244

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Old Aug 10th, 2020, 21:27   #1591
Laird Scooby
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Talking about mobiles, 'L.S.' and Alan's point about cheap, 'disposable' products caused me to reflect on just how far we have advanced (?) in 30 years.

I bought my first mobile when I went self-employed in 1991, justifying it as giving me an 'edge' when looking for work. The phone (and it was only a phone) was one of the first Motorola flip-phones which cost me £400 and came with two batteries, since one could not make it through the day. A fitted car-phone in my 244 would have cost c£2k.

There were just two networks; the airtime contract on both was the same - £25 per month - and calls cost 25p per minute (charged in half-minute increments after the first minute).

In contrast, my current Motorola smart phone, which I'm sure has features that I don't even know about, cost me just over £100. Today, my contract costs me under £9 per month and includes 500 minutes, 500 texts and 500 Meg of data, of which I normally use less than 10% of each. I've just bought a new battery for it off ebay for £8 as the original, now 3 years old, was starting to get a little tired.

Progress? You be the judge!

Regards, John.
The very first Motorola STAR-TACs in 1990 (flip-phones) were a heady £1257 when they were introduced John, That said, in 1990 i was able to sell fitted car phones for 99p (+ fitting of course but at a reasonable £70-100, depending on the car and the aerial they wanted) due to network kickbacks aka connection commissions. The airtime was more expensive though, £35/moth + 60p/minute, again billed in 30 second increments after the first minute.

Around 1992/3, they changed them to Micro-TAC but were essentially the same basic flip-phone but with extra ring tones. Also the battery would last a day easily. Mine cost me £1 and about £30/month in 1994/5 time, got it for work and was promptly laid off about a month later.

Fast forward to now and my current Motorola MOTO G5 does so much more than the original Micro-TAC, has unlimited minutes and texts plus 1GB data for £30.43/month. However i also get a 5GB data boost by having my landline with the same company. Officially the contract is called £29/month but RPI increases have caused it to jump to the figure quoted from that.

The new contract is exactly £21/month and comes with a MOTO G8, an updated version of the G5 i currently have.

Then again look at the humble radio. Look back a few decades and you were lucky to have manual tuning and FM as a waveband choice. Now even basic ones comes with electronic memory tuning, digital displays and so on.

Depends what you call progress but some things are just plain strange - WiFi controlled washing machines? Really?
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Old Aug 11th, 2020, 00:17   #1592
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From one rambling to another - that with Bob!

As for consumerism, i have a mobile phone that i've had for 2-3 years, very happy with it and wouldn't change despite the fact i'm being offered a new phone as my contrick is up for renewal soon.

However, for no apparent reason, the screen cracked one morning. Thought it was an eyelash on the screen at first but it quickly grew to a size reminiscent of Sasha-fur and a few minutes later, went straight across which would make her fur something approaching Old English Sheepdog (Dulux dog) length.

Being a touchscreen jobby, it's now causing problems with typos and sometimes with things i haven't even been near to typing! Investigating the cost of a replacement screen, i can buy one from fleabay for £20 and fit it myself. Alternatively i can drive for an hour, park somewhere near a shop in Norwich and pay them £80 to supply and fit a screen.

I still have ~3 months to go on my contract so to end it early and get a free new phone, it would currently cost me ~£80, reducing at the rate of £0.73/day.

A new phone is guaranteed so if the same thing happens in the first year, it gets repaired FOC but the bigger benefit is from changing the contract to the newer version of what i currently have - that will save me £9 a month as well!

Surely that's proactively encouraging consumerism?
... I'm hoping you have done the right thing Dave: bought yourself a £20 replacement screen from eBay and fixed the phone yourself. When Dan was younger he went through a spate of breaking iPhone screens - I got good at changing them and can swap an iPhone 5 or 6 screen in around 10 minutes now.

There is an expensive but salutary addendum to this story: after a while I realised the iPhones were getting broken a bit too frequently, they weren't being looked after because they were not trendy enough amongst Dan's cohort at school. The solution was to ask Dan which phone he wanted (I'd always bought iPhones because that it what I use - always buy them outright and have a SIM only contract)... the answer was he wanted a Google Pixel 2. We went to Curry's electrical store that eve and Dad left about £500 poorer, but the cell phone is cherished and there has not been a single broken screen since. Here endeth the lesson (for Dad).

:-)
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Old Aug 11th, 2020, 00:21   #1593
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Originally Posted by john.wigley View Post
Talking about mobiles, 'L.S.' and Alan's point about cheap, 'disposable' products caused me to reflect on just how far we have advanced (?) in 30 years.

I bought my first mobile when I went self-employed in 1991, justifying it as giving me an 'edge' when looking for work. The phone (and it was only a phone) was one of the first Motorola flip-phones which cost me £400 and came with two batteries, since one could not make it through the day. A fitted car-phone in my 244 would have cost c£2k.

There were just two networks; the airtime contract on both was the same - £25 per month - and calls cost 25p per minute (charged in half-minute increments after the first minute).

In contrast, my current Motorola smart phone, which I'm sure has features that I don't even know about, cost me just over £100. Today, my contract costs me under £9 per month and includes 500 minutes, 500 texts and 500 Meg of data, of which I normally use less than 10% of each. I've just bought a new battery for it off ebay for £8 as the original, now 3 years old, was starting to get a little tired.

Progress? You be the judge!

Regards, John.
Well John, it is certainly progress: cell phones are now affordable for absolutely everyone. I even have a second one (a ruggedised 'King Kong') that I mostly use for SATNAV in the RB and on motorcycles.

Unless one really must have the very latest then technology is very cheap indeed. Sure, that is progress.

Alan
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Old Aug 11th, 2020, 00:37   #1594
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... I'm hoping you have done the right thing Dave: bought yourself a £20 replacement screen from eBay and fixed the phone yourself. When Dan was younger he went through a spate of breaking iPhone screens - I got good at changing them and can swap an iPhone 5 or 6 screen in around 10 minutes now.

There is an expensive but salutary addendum to this story: after a while I realised the iPhones were getting broken a bit too frequently, they weren't being looked after because they were not trendy enough amongst Dan's cohort at school. The solution was to ask Dan which phone he wanted (I'd always bought iPhones because that it what I use - always buy them outright and have a SIM only contract)... the answer was he wanted a Google Pixel 2. We went to Curry's electrical store that eve and Dad left about £500 poorer, but the cell phone is cherished and there has not been a single broken screen since. Here endeth the lesson (for Dad).

:-)
I haven't Alan, these days my paws are a bit shaky and my eyes aren't great for close work either so it will be done eventually once i've secured another phone. It will then either be sold on fleabay or kept as a spare if it's successful, if it isn't, i will have tried.

The Google Pixel 2 is roughly equivalent to the MOTO G5 i have now, both being made by Lenovo under the Motorola and/or Google brands, Google having bought the phone division of Motorola and having some tie-up with Lenovo.
The G8 is similarly a rebranded/badged GooglePixel 3a so lookout when Dan gets wind of the 3a - just pray he doesn't decide he wants the new Motorola RAZR flip at £1500 outright purchase! Nice flip-phone though!
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Old Aug 11th, 2020, 00:37   #1595
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The very first Motorola STAR-TACs in 1990 (flip-phones) were a heady £1257 when they were introduced John, That said, in 1990 i was able to sell fitted car phones for 99p (+ fitting of course but at a reasonable £70-100, depending on the car and the aerial they wanted) due to network kickbacks aka connection commissions. The airtime was more expensive though, £35/moth + 60p/minute, again billed in 30 second increments after the first minute.

Around 1992/3, they changed them to Micro-TAC but were essentially the same basic flip-phone but with extra ring tones. Also the battery would last a day easily. Mine cost me £1 and about £30/month in 1994/5 time, got it for work and was promptly laid off about a month later.

Fast forward to now and my current Motorola MOTO G5 does so much more than the original Micro-TAC, has unlimited minutes and texts plus 1GB data for £30.43/month. However i also get a 5GB data boost by having my landline with the same company. Officially the contract is called £29/month but RPI increases have caused it to jump to the figure quoted from that.

The new contract is exactly £21/month and comes with a MOTO G8, an updated version of the G5 i currently have.

Then again look at the humble radio. Look back a few decades and you were lucky to have manual tuning and FM as a waveband choice. Now even basic ones comes with electronic memory tuning, digital displays and so on.

Depends what you call progress but some things are just plain strange - WiFi controlled washing machines? Really?
Progress... sometimes it is frustrating. This morn a mate who lives about 12 miles away in Market Harborough called and said he had to vacate his garage by Friday - I'm sure he has known for a while, but I agreed to help. The problem was that his BMW Z4 (a third car that only gets used perhaps 3 times per year) could not be started and was stuck in the garage.

This afternoon I drove over to MH with tools, jump leads, charger etc. The problem was the car had been driven front first into the garage, the battery is in the boot, but that only way of opening it was via the electric solenoid. The car also has an electric parking brake and is a modern automatic, electrically locked in P. Surely none of that was really progress? All that electronic stuff that made the car almost completely inaccessible just because of a flat battery.

... after about an hour (including quite a bit of googling on my cell phone) I managed to rig up an old motorbike battery to a charging terminal the car has in the engine compartment which gave just enough power to pop the boot solenoid and access the (one year old) battery.

I have never seen a battery so flat - it registered zero volts on a multi-meter so a jump start would not have worked. Of the two chargers I had the digital one would not recognise the battery at all, and the old fashioned one would not charge it slowly enough (9A, so the thermal cut out kept tripping). The only solution was to take it to the battery shop from whence it came to have it re-charged overnight (I think that will probably work - we'll find out tomorrow).

I really can't think any of that is really progress. BMW has filled the car with clever electronics but forgotten to make it usable or repairable. The RB is a much better design :-)

Alan

PS. I have to confess: I did buy a robot vacuum cleaner a few months ago - it was just so clever for the money :-)

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Old Aug 11th, 2020, 00:47   #1596
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I haven't Alan, these days my paws are a bit shaky and my eyes aren't great for close work either so it will be done eventually once i've secured another phone. It will then either be sold on fleabay or kept as a spare if it's successful, if it isn't, i will have tried.

The Google Pixel 2 is roughly equivalent to the MOTO G5 i have now, both being made by Lenovo under the Motorola and/or Google brands, Google having bought the phone division of Motorola and having some tie-up with Lenovo.
The G8 is similarly a rebranded/badged GooglePixel 3a so lookout when Dan gets wind of the 3a - just pray he doesn't decide he wants the new Motorola RAZR flip at £1500 outright purchase! Nice flip-phone though!
I get a feeling you are not an iPhone man Dave (I have been on the Apple treadmill for a while because they are so darn convenient, but I never buy the latest model)? I bought myself a new iPhone 7 (with 128 Gb of memory for under £180 new, boxed and delivered to my house) a few weeks ago, so I have a spare iPhone 6 (about 3 years old that still works perfectly well) sitting in the drawer just in case. If you need an okay phone on long term loan until your new contact starts then you would be most welcome to it.

Alan
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Old Aug 11th, 2020, 01:28   #1597
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Progress... sometimes it is frustrating. This morn a mate who lives about 12 miles away in Market Harborough called and said he had to vacate his garage by Friday - I'm sure he has known for a while, but I agreed to help. The problem was that his BMW Z4 (a third car that only gets used perhaps 3 times per year) could not be started and was stuck in the garage.

This afternoon I drove over to MH with tools, jump leads, charger etc. The problem was the car had been driven front first into the garage, the battery is in the boot, but that only way of opening it was via the electric solenoid. The car also has an electric parking brake and is a modern automatic, electrically locked in P. Surely none of that was really progress? All that electronic stuff that made the car almost completely inaccessible just because of a flat battery.

... after about an hour (including quite a bit of googling on my cell phone) I managed to rig up an old motorbike battery to a charging terminal the car has in the engine compartment which gave just enough power to pop the boot solenoid and access the (one year old) battery.

I have never seen a battery so flat - it registered zero volts on a multi-meter so a jump start would not have worked. Of the two chargers I had the digital one would not recognise the battery at all, and the old fashioned one would not charge it slowly enough (9A, so the thermal cut out kept tripping). The only solution was to take it to the battery shop from whence it came to have it re-charged overnight (I think that will probably work - we'll find out tomorrow).

I really can't think any of that is really progress. BMW has filled the car with clever electronics but forgotten to make it usable or repairable. The RB is a much better design :-)

Alan

PS. I have to confess: I did buy a robot vacuum cleaner a few months ago - it was just so clever for the money :-)
The moral of the tale is - reverse into the garage! You could have hooked the jump leads up and started yours, letting it fast idle (1500-2000rpm) for about 15-20 minutes so the jump start would probably have worked once you had access to the boot of the Z4 - assuming there isn't a BMW lockout that prevents jump starting that way! Would have caned the bejesus out of your alternator for that time though!

Back in the mid 90s i came to the conclusion BMW were building probnlems into cars, had a 5- series through the workshops because one of the rear doors had deadlocked itself and the central locking motor had failed. Access to the motor was only available after removing the door card obviously - less obviously is with the door deadlocked, the rear seat squab had to come out first to gain access to hidden (by the squab) parts of the door card which could only be partly removed anyway. It was enough to disconnect the rods though and open the door manually so a proper repair could be effected.
While the seat squab was out, the battery revealed itself with no less than 7 computers of various forms tieing everything the car did into one main (extra) computer plus of course the Motronics engine management ECU as well.

It seems they've continued this course of action with your mates Z4 and the various ECUs simply flattened the battery!

As for a vacuum cleaner, i'll stick to my 31 year old Kirby! Have enough trouble with the hound with that, never mind what she would perceive as another animal doing the vacuuming!
Besides, it would only take one stray bone and the robot one would be history!



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I get a feeling you are not an iPhone man Dave (I have been on the Apple treadmill for a while because they are so darn convenient, but I never buy the latest model)? I bought myself a new iPhone 7 (with 128 Gb of memory for under £180 new, boxed and delivered to my house) a few weeks ago, so I have a spare iPhone 6 (about 3 years old that still works perfectly well) sitting in the drawer just in case. If you need an okay phone on long term loan until your new contact starts then you would be most welcome to it.

Alan
Definitely not an i-Phone man Alan, many thanks for the offer though and i'll certainly bear it in mind. I'm hoping i can muddle through, i worked out about a week ago the optimum time financially (off-setting the cost of buying out the remaining contract against the savings on the new contract etc) is about 4-8 weeks from now so i'm hoping that firstly they have the phone i want in stock then and that no financial disasters happen meanwhile. Oh yeah - and the phone i have survives until then!
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Old Aug 11th, 2020, 07:48   #1598
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The moral of the tale is - reverse into the garage! You could have hooked the jump leads up and started yours, letting it fast idle (1500-2000rpm) for about 15-20 minutes so the jump start would probably have worked once you had access to the boot of the Z4 - assuming there isn't a BMW lockout that prevents jump starting that way! Would have caned the bejesus out of your alternator for that time though!

Back in the mid 90s i came to the conclusion BMW were building probnlems into cars, had a 5- series through the workshops because one of the rear doors had deadlocked itself and the central locking motor had failed. Access to the motor was only available after removing the door card obviously - less obviously is with the door deadlocked, the rear seat squab had to come out first to gain access to hidden (by the squab) parts of the door card which could only be partly removed anyway. It was enough to disconnect the rods though and open the door manually so a proper repair could be effected.
While the seat squab was out, the battery revealed itself with no less than 7 computers of various forms tieing everything the car did into one main (extra) computer plus of course the Motronics engine management ECU as well.

It seems they've continued this course of action with your mates Z4 and the various ECUs simply flattened the battery!

As for a vacuum cleaner, i'll stick to my 31 year old Kirby! Have enough trouble with the hound with that, never mind what she would perceive as another animal doing the vacuuming!
Besides, it would only take one stray bone and the robot one would be history!
:
I've told my mate with the Z4 that he should reverse into the garage - and to start and run the car once per week - and to park with the electric parking brake off ... about 100 million times (it seems). Not to worry, I'll probably get the car going this afternoon. I didn't fancy blowing up the alternator on the Skoda by risking jump charging a battery with very low resistance at 30A for half an hour yesterday, otherwise we could have ended up with two dead cars at a remote lock up garage.

I've fixed that Z4 quite a few times, and I've told my mate this is the last time I'll rescue it. If he isn't going to use the car then sell it as soon as I get it going (particularly as he has just lost his lock up garage). It won't last long parked on the road.

I'm not a BMW fan. I bought a brand new 318 touring about 30 years ago (tax free, I was being posted back to Germany). I'd ordered it at short notice over the phone and showed up at the very swish showroom at Park Lane to collect, only to notice the car didn't have a radio fitted. I asked the suited salesman where was the radio, and he explained that I had not specified one so they had not fitted it, but I could of course purchase on of their BMW (re-branded blue-spot) radios that started at only £400 (a lot of money in about 1991). It had not occurred to me that I might have to order a radio separately for what was quite an up market car - I'd bought a couple of new Mazdas in the years prior and they came with everything as standard (certainly radios, A/C and electric windows all round). I took the car away somewhat in disgust, bought a pretty good Kenwood radio for less than half the price BMW had wanted in the NAAFI when I got to Germany. I've never bought a new (or used) BMW since - I just don't like the company's way of doing things (and they seem to be driven by pretentious people that often insist on overtaking my Porsche whatever the risk).

Ho hum, time for Bob's first walk.

Alan

PS. We don't need the robot vacuum cleaner, but it is just so cool.

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Old Aug 11th, 2020, 09:33   #1599
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I get a feeling you are not an iPhone man Dave (I have been on the Apple treadmill for a while because they are so darn convenient, but I never buy the latest model)? I bought myself a new iPhone 7 (with 128 Gb of memory for under £180 new, boxed and delivered to my house) a few weeks ago, so I have a spare iPhone 6 (about 3 years old that still works perfectly well) sitting in the drawer just in case. If you need an okay phone on long term loan until your new contact starts then you would be most welcome to it.

Alan
I'm with the Laird - I had an iPhone 4s many years ago, mainly because a good friend worked me a good deal on the contract, but kept it only until the contract lapsed, at which point I reverted to a BlackBerry and have stayed with BlackBerrys(ies?) ever since, currently using a Key2. I find Apple treats users like children, forever admonishing them to "back up this phone. It has not been backed up in the last two weeks" even though you haven't altered any of the data in that period, whereas the BlackBerry assumes you're an adult and will back it up as and when you have to.
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Old Aug 11th, 2020, 11:51   #1600
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I'm with the Laird - I had an iPhone 4s many years ago, mainly because a good friend worked me a good deal on the contract, but kept it only until the contract lapsed, at which point I reverted to a BlackBerry and have stayed with BlackBerrys(ies?) ever since, currently using a Key2. I find Apple treats users like children, forever admonishing them to "back up this phone. It has not been backed up in the last two weeks" even though you haven't altered any of the data in that period, whereas the BlackBerry assumes you're an adult and will back it up as and when you have to.
... I agree Loki. Even though I'm an iPhone and iPad user, I still don't like the company much. The lack of backwards compatibility of its software, constant meddling with new versions, programmed in obsolescence and thinking iot knows what the user wants (I remember one update giving me a 'free' copy of some U2 songs that was like a dose of herpes to get rid of) are all really irritating.

I got on the iPhone/iPad conveyor almost by accident a few years ago and now it the data management is just too difficult to make it worthwhile stepping off.

Alan

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