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Need help researching story on old service manuals

I'm writing about how hard it is to get service manuals these days from non-sketchy sources like eBay and bittorrent.

I need help finding examples where manufacturers have abandoned the product. So a situation like this:

  • The manufacturer used to sell the manuals (or gave them away)
  • The manuals are no longer available for sale from the manufacturer
  • The product is still in use, even by a few people

In these cases, consumers are being forced to get information from illegal / sketchy sources, and it's out of date because we can't put it on iFixit and improve it.

With old information like this, the community could benefit greatly from an open source manual that we could all make better.

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I have a better example

Dell doesn't publish manuals for recent machines(5 years or so), but they publish manuals for machines older then 5 years

Some examples of old machines I know of to have manuals

Dimension 8100

Dimension 4500S

Dimension 4300S

Dimension 5150

Dimension 5100

Dimension E510

Optiplex 745

Latitude D600

D610

D620

D630

D830

D840

etc.....

Anything newer having a manual is a 50/50

I know of Lenovo to publish manuals for all their laptops, and maybe desktops no matter how old

HP publishes their service manuals for certain laptops and desktops

As to the situation with older Dells Dell no longer makes parts for, I still like to use them as backup bench Linux PC's to replace a fallen system till I can get parts or a better system flat out that's still used being you can't seem to kill them, but it seems capacitor plague kills most of them as I have had 3 with issues(1 4300S and 2 4500S systems) become unstable because of Capacitor Plague

I may recap one of the 4500S motherboards as a older bench Linux PC, but that's up in the air because of their age(2002)

The only reason I still use a older Mac from 2009 is the cost, ease to fix and the fact it has been fixed, and yes, I don't need a better laptop and can wait a little longer, and the next one will not be a Mac

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Kyle Wiens, just looking around in my shop, there are multiple projects that either never got started, or got stalled, because of the lack of good service manuals. A few examples are :

COLECO VISION Console

INTELLIVISION Video Game Console

Atari Jaguar

Atari 2600/2800

Original Sony Walkman

Sony Watchman

Sony MiniDisc player

Rio-Sport

Original Koss Pro headphones

Any Toshiba Laptop

Any coffee maker

Any VCR

Most Digital cameras

Sure, a few of these items can be purchased in a newer version. Some of these items are most certainly in many consumers "junk drawer" and will stay there until they find their way to the landfill. The consumer market is saturated with new, shiny, smaller electronics. What about the "old iron"? What about regions in this world that do not have the economical or technological resources that we have? ifixit is a worldwide forum and a lot of places do still make use of stuff we have long abandoned. I feel that any of the older consumer electronics, whatever it may be, would benefit from any service manual. Amazingly enough it is easier to obtain reprints of service manuals from old tube radios, than 80',90's consumer electronics. Most of the times I depend on other users experience and home made teardowns in order to fix those. Just my 2 cents and not sure if that is what you had in mind.

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Kyle Wiens will be eternally grateful.