Washing machine repair in the 21st Century: upgrade the OS

Cory Doctorow 10:14 pm Sun Dec 14, 2008

It's 6AM here in London and I'm sitting in the living room with the baby, listening to the washing-machine hum away in the kitchen. The washing machine, a Hotpoint combo washer-dryer (jack of all trades, master of none, I'm afraid) started blowing the breaker every time we ran it about a month ago. On Saturday, we had a technician in from the manufacturer. After prodding at it with a multimeter for a while, he shrugged, pulled out a laptop and an EPROM burner, burned a new EPROM, took the old one out, and installed it. And now my washing machine is fine and doesn't trip the breaker. Turns out that all it needed was a more up-to-date version of the OS.

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