Warkus is a Legend!! (aka Mark)

[warkus]

It's ok Gully,

Thanks for the offer, but all good.

Am not distressed really, just didnt think the description was all that accurate thats all.

Lord Warkus fits better... (Now seriously, that was just jokes...)

It's fine. I am generally just a fairly quite person so being referred to as a legend does take a bit of getting used to.

Thanks though to all that have offered kind words. I will try to keep up the good work wherever possible.

Mark

[dwd1249]

Well I asked Mark if I could buy some caps from him for my S-1 power supply as it had the Saxmon brand caps in it. They arrived and there was an extra 470uf cap . When I ask about it he told me there is another Saxmon cap that doesn't fail but I might like to replace it any way.

After about an hour on the soldering iron and my 61 yo eyes about buggered I was ready to smoke test. All went a treat until I went to close the dvd tray. The bugger opened back up. As I hadn't put the cover on yet I could see the tray hitting the power cable, A quick tuck under of the cable and all is good.

Note if using some solder wick that has been kicking around your tool box for 8 or so years the first 40mm or so doesn't work so well.

Thanks to Mark & the BW forum in general
Dave

[IanSav]

Hi,

Time to bump this thread with another Warkus success story. I assisted another friend to install a Warkus refurbished power supply and front panel into his DP-S1. I am happy to report another total success.

Thank you Mark.

Regards,
Ian.

[Jammer]

Well, yet another incredibly satisfied client here. I've had some issues with my PSU for a while now but only recently got around to send it to Mark for repair. Very fast turnaround, excellent communication and - fingers crossed - a totally successful repair.

I'd pretty much resigned myself to having to buy a new PVR/media player and really wasn't looking forward to all the research etc involved with this.....I'd been thinking about moving on from Beyonwiz to another machine. Thankfully, Mark was able to get my S1 back up and running and hopefully with a new lease of life.

Thanks Mark!!! You've saved me a lot of money but most importantly, you've saved me a lot of time and stress from having to look around for another device.

EDIT: Have just been reading the other posts before mine and I think Mark's board status should definitely be changed from "Master" to "Legend"!

[craigh]

Well I have to say Mark certainly helped me out as well.

I had an S1 exhibiting the problems with power supply failure so followed his instructions I replaced the components only to find i still had issues.

Mark looked at my work and deemed it was fine so in the end he looked at my main board and found an issue in the power circuits for USB and Ethernet.

He fixed the main board and sent it back along with a replacement IDE cable to replace my damaged one.

So at the end of it i now have a working S1 and decided it was also a good time to upgrade the HD's again using Hitachi SATA drives and Altronics adapter from Mark.

2.5 terabytes of storage across an SI and 2 P1's with a couple of H1's for good measure

Overall I cant fault marks assistance. Thankyou

[bruce]

And yet another very satisfied customer! Mark sent me the caps and, with the reassurance I felt knowing that worst case I could pack up the PSU and send it to him, I dived in and repaired my S1 power supply. I'd forgotten what the display looked like it'd been so long since I'd seen it. USB is working properly again and I'm a very happy S1 owner again.

[mickotab]

This is a recurring theme, perhaps a retainer from BW is in order!!

Most definately pjc3!

Mark has just repaired my PSU brialliantly,..... left my place (Newcaslte, NSW) last Thursday night and was back in my Post Box the following Thursday morning!

Absolutley brilliant if you take the postage out of the equation. Marks service gives Beyonwiz a free hit in my opinion and he should get some kind of regocnition from them.... and if its in the order of $$$ all the better.

Seriously though if I went through Beyonwiz H/O it would have been 4-6 weeks according to previous posts and more than likely to have cost far far more in $$$..... a process which would have left me with a bad taste in the mouth and probably make me look at other makes when replacing it.

Well done and thanks again Mark

[Fat Pat]

This Mark in question also fixes other stuff. He fixed a PSU issue on my Tuner/Amp last year, about 18 years old, and he knew what to do....so he's not just a 'Wiz wiz, if you know what I mean



PS, the P2 is running sweet mate.

[dhphoto]

My S1 had not caused me grief, but it was very old. The unit was well used, probably the most used of any Wiz box, in the house.

We always, put this in standby and it has been well ventilated. Lately I could hear, intermittently, an HDD tick. Recycle in/out of standby, and it would be fine. Front panel, USB power, all worked fine.

It really is the 'Forrest Gump', box of chocolates, as to the issue(s) you may encounter with your S1 PSU.

With a CoTD DP2 to replace this work horse, I sent the PSU off to Mark for a capacitor refresh. I took the opportunity to upgrade to a 400GB Samsung I'd taken from a friend's other branded PVR that went bang and smokey.

All good, such simple and smooth process.

Thanks Mark.

[rogercjs]

I think the topic should be bumped on a regular basis, because Warkus is a legend

Yes, once again I must bump this topic.

I recently bought a second hand P1 from eBay (yes I can hear the groans and see the raised eyebrows from here!) but the seller had a 100% rating and answered a question from another buyer stating that he could see the unit connected and working at his house. It appeared to work OK until I tried to do a full service scan and there was no reception. A quick call to Mark and he told me the component to test, this was indeed stuffed and he sent me a replacement. I did the repair and it works fine, so it is now, indeed, a bargain!

Once again I am very grateful for your help Mark. My advice to all members and non members reading this, is that if you have any problems with your BWiz send it to Mark. You will be assured of the best service.

Cheers,

Roger.

[scho]

It is now my turn to "bump this topic" and say thanks to Mark.

My P2 started playing up after nearly 3 years of faithful service. Mark repaired the PSU and when I still could not get it working properly he assisted on the phone for over an hour as we tried to revive it. He was able to remotely diagnose a faulty main board which he then cheerfully and very cheaply repaired. My unit is now working perfectly again (and my wife is happy again).

I am very grateful for his expertise and outstanding Customer Service ethic.

"Legend" status confirmed and reinforced.

[irosko]

Add me to the list too.....Mark is awesome and helped me so much in the past.......very grateful!

Thanks mate!

[valdyg]

Up to the top again. Posted my DP-P2 PSU, Melbourne to Perth, to Mark late on Wednesday. It's back in the Wiz and running on Monday afternoon. Mark also kept me informed of progress. Couldn't ask for better service.

[Crow]

Looks like this thread was moving to far down the list again.

Mark did an excellent job replacing my capacitors and my DP-S1 is healthy again.

Great job with a very quick turnaround time.

[Lex200]

Warkus has saved yet another S1 and been incredibly helpful as well.

Using a slightly more expensive courier, the power supply left Melbourne on Tuesday and returned Friday. It seems to be fully recovered from its recent woes and ready for the opening weekend of the Rugby World Cup.

Many many thanks to Warkus

[lynxwildcat]

Another post from a satisfied customer of Mark / Warkus.

Sent my faulty DP-P1 power supply via Express Post from Melbourne to Perth, fixed, and returned by Friday. Great communications during the whole time.

When I got the unit back, I could not tell which capacitors were manually soldered, quality of work was so good.

Overall and excellent customer experience - I wish all companies I dealt with were as professional as Mark.

Clearly many of the early Beyonwiz units did not use optimal parts, so Mark has great work for the future. $55 repair saved me ~$100s from buying a new unit or risking electrocution doing it myself.

THANKS MARK!!!!

[Smergen]

Another post from a satisfied customer of Mark / Warkus.

Sent my faulty DP-P1 power supply via Express Post from Melbourne to Perth, fixed, and returned by Friday. Great communications during the whole time.

When I got the unit back, I could not tell which capacitors were manually soldered, quality of work was so good.

Overall and excellent customer experience - I wish all companies I dealt with were as professional as Mark.

Clearly many of the early Beyonwiz units did not use optimal parts, so Mark has great work for the future. $55 repair saved me ~$100s from buying a new unit or risking electrocution doing it myself.

THANKS MARK!!!!

Was going to write a similar post myself, but saw that yours reflected my experience identically. Top work Warkus and just another bump to get this to the top of the list.

[IanSav]

Hi,

Time to bump this thread again...

Two weeks ago my DP-S1 started playing up. HD recordings were stuttering and buggering up. I diagnosed a pending hard disk failure. (I was still using the original 200GB drive that came with the Beyonwiz about 5 years ago.) I opened the unit to swap out the drive and noticed that I also had a bulging capacitor in the power supply. I photographed the power supply and sought Mark's professional opinion. The affected capacitor is not one that usually fails. (Mark has previously refurbished my power supply for the standard aging capacitor problem.) I suspect this failure may be heat related as the failing hard drive had significantly increased the ambient temperature within the Beyonwiz case.

Mark requested that I ship the power supply to him for closer examination. The power supply left Melbourne on Monday morning last week and was fixed and returned by very early Friday morning. The unit is re-assembled and working great! Thank you Mark.

By the way I am using one of Mark's IDE to SATA adaptors to connect my new 500GB Seagate Pipeline HD.2 into the DP-S1. All working well. I was even able to save almost all of the recordings on the nearly full 200GB drive that failed. All I lost was a single 1MB chunk out of two different recordings. I am yet to see what affect this loss will have caused. No matter, it is only very small loss in the scheme of things.

Thank you again Mark. By the way I think I should order another spare IDE to SATA converter.

Regards,
Ian.

[Brett]

I have put details of my experience at the ‘Error 0000’ thread.

But I would like to echo the comments here on Mark’s service level and attitude. Without him my P2 might be in the dustbin.

Thanks Mark.

[Stubn]

Its my turn to thank Warkus for his help, my P1 has worked fabulously since having its PSU reconditioned.

In my case Warkus sent me the parts and a short guide. An hour or so later.. Job done!

Thanks again Mark for your advice and answering my questions. I couldn't have done it without your help!!!

[BobxT]

Hi All,

My old DP-S1 is now fully working after warkus had repaired both the Power Supply and Clock boards.

The Power supply board had Bad Caps, dry solder joints and the Clock board had the Clock crystal and a super Cap fitted.

Thanks warkus (aka Mark).

Regards,
BobxT
26 January 2012 14:17

[rsquires]

Hi there,

just wanted to do a shout out to Warkus who fixed my PSU. It was very badly heat affected (probably due to the cat lying on it) and it is now pretty much brand new. I also took the chance whilst I was in there to change the HDD drive to a Western Digital 320 GB Caviar Blue which works fine. Nice to have an extra 100 GB to record to.

Only fly in the ointment was that Marks assistant forgot to post the parcel so it arrived a week late. Not a real problem though.

all the best

Richard

[PLANT]

Some give me a cost to ship it from Brisbane to be repaired and shipped back?
S1 still working but must be close to capacitor issues due to age?

[Gully]

Some give me a cost to ship it from Brisbane to be repaired and shipped back?
S1 still working but must be close to capacitor issues due to age?

Send a PM to Warkus (Mark) and he can give you an idea of all the costs.

[Jawbraeka]

You my friend are one of the best people i have the pleasure of knowing.. not only is this man a god amongst men.. he fixed my DP-P2 and i am once again a happy man with a happy family.

we can now go back to taping our shows and getting to do that is something that we have all missed mate.. words can't describe the joy mate...

AWESOME.. and remind me to get you a beer if i ever have the privilege of meeting you in person..

Jawbraeka..

anyone who needs a hand Warkus is your man...

[strife]

Another happy customer, sent my PS on Thursday from Sydney and had it back in my hands on Tuesday afternoon.

Awesome job and turnaround ,

thanks Mark

[deb404]

After reading this thread, maybe there is hope for my wiz. I can't bring myself to toss it.
Kept getting check HDD messages and won't record but still use ok as STB. Would appreciate any help I can get

[SomebodyElse]

Hi Mark

I'm slightly surprised to see that it was almost two years since I undertook the DP-S1 power supply refurbishment. The unit still works fine, but in the last few weeks the LED brightness has dropped again, just as it did pre-refurb. Very occasionally it would return to normal, but in the last week or so it's consistently been barely visible.

I'm reluctant to undertake the full refurb again, especially as I am not sure if it is the same problem or not. Any thoughts on remedies for this, please? Thanks.

[warkus]

Definitely sounds like its failed again sadly.

2 years does not surprise me, depends on its use and the type of cap you used in refurb/replacement. I have done some peoples PSU at 12 months although rare.

It could be the display itself too but thats unlikley.

If you wanted to check, replace C35 only, its one of the 330uf capacitors. If the display comes back then I would recap the rest too. Have you checked the PSU to see if any are visually bulging.

BTY, for interest sake, the repair thread needs an overhaul, which I have almost finished in PDF, and will amend sometime as soon as I can.

Over time, as they are getting older, they are failing to a higher degree. If you can hear a very high pitched noise from your PSU then you may need more caps replaced.

The other thing is to check U23, a regulator right next to C35. This regulator cracks off the PCB from heat, be very careful touching it when you replace C35, as it does not take much to cracks the tracks off the PCB believe me and then you will need to rework the tracks to rejoin it.

These PSU's really are a shocker!!!

Mark

[SomebodyElse]

Thanks Mark, I'm fairly sure I kept the excess caps somewhere so I'll have to crack it open at the weekend.

That said, what are the implications of just letting them go? The Wiz is relegated to kids' use in the bedroom for playing back off the network. If I just leave it will something eventually cark it?

Thanks again for your sage advice.

[peteru]

PSU trouble + kids bedroom? Given that it could fail with a short and start a fire, I would not risk it. Not for the sake of $10 in parts and a few hours of your time.

[SomebodyElse]

Thanks Peter, I hadn't even considered the risk of shorting and fire! I was more thinking about if I let it go, will it eventually fail and stop working altogether, or will I see other minor issues such as the faded display. If the only perceptible problem were a faded display, I probably wouldn't bother.

I'm not questioning your credentials, but why is this an increased risk of shorting and fire? Surely an important capacitor fails and the system stops working? Otherwise is there not a similar risk in any device's PSU that uses inferior capacitors? I just don't recall this being raised as a big risk in the past.

[brianh]

If a capacitor fails, it means it is no longer filtering the voltage that it is supposed to and the voltage can rise beyond its design value. This can put much more "pressure" on other components than they are supposed to handle, and they can then fail in a more dramatic fashion - creating a lot of heat in the process. If the heat happens to affect something plastic - such as the casing of many semiconductors and IC's - then it is possible to end up with fire as well. It doesn't happen very often, but it only needs to happen once and as Peter said, it only costs a few dollars to stop Murphy from even looking up your address.

As you speculated, this is a potential issue with ALL electronic devices with electrolytic capacitors, over time they will dry out or fail in other ways - the better the cap, the longer the time. It is especially so in devices that employ switchmode power supplies, they are used because they are much lighter and cheaper to manufacture but unfortunately when larger voltages are involved, the risk to downstream components is greater.

For example, TV's and LCD displays are another item that have been known to suffer this fate. There are a few big name manufacturers that have had problems with this issue, not just the likes of Beyonwiz, especially with the pressure of cost vs return when making batches of models that get updated regularly, so component choices are aimed not at the absolute best, but those expected to last long enough vs. how much they add to the unit cost.

[sub3R]

Hi SomebodyElse.

Here are a couple of links if you want to do some light reading about electrolytic capacitor problems:
The badcaps.net/forum has this topic & also much more info about bad & good caps.
This Wikipedia article has some information about electrolytic caps.
... And they cause headaches for the big boys too – a problem not just in the US.

[SomebodyElse]

Thanks guys. I couldn't see any bulging caps, but I managed to find the spare caps from last time and replaced the whole set anyway and we're all good again!

[dcw]

Another vote of thanks to Mark!

After 5 years without any H/W problems, my P1 packed up after being recommissioned following a 6 week lay-off while my amp was being repaired. The power supply blew and took a number of other components with it.

From the extensive list of components Mark used, it looks as if he virtually rebuilt the whole thing! It is now running fine and back on duty.

I don't think Mark charged me anything approaching the time he must have spent repairing it.

Thanks Mark.

Dave

[_DrifteR_]

Yet another post to say thanks to Mark (and to nudge this post). My DP-P2 had been working flawlessly for the last 4 years until I got the Error 0000 message last week and thanks to Mark I now have my Wiz back up and working. Excellent service and great price.

While I'm at it, I'll extend this thanks to all the forum members that have made owning a Wiz a lot of fun. This forum has promoted a great culture for development, improvement and general sharing of knowledge. I hope 'the next big thing' (Beyonwiz?) attracts this sort of crowd.

dp

[dcw]

I thought this was a sticky?

[IanSav]

Hi David,

I thought this was a sticky?

It should be!

Regards,
Ian.

[AndrewSmith]

Well, here's another vote for Mark being deemed to have 'legend' status conferred upon him.

We had a brief power outage in Brisbane last night and I found that both of my BW units were non-responsive during the next day. Upon re-booting they both gave 'Error 0000' and thus my google-fu brought me back through to this forum.

I PM'd Mark and he spotted the real issue straight away ... the PSUs have a surge/trip feature. Leave the P1/P2 units off for at least a minute and power them back on again ... and I'm a happy camper! Both BW units performing as if nothing had happened.

And I thought I'd be up for a couple of fixed PSUs.

Humble deep thanks to Mark, whose assistance makes the BW products even more attractive to purchase when you know that people like him are at hand on the forums.

Andrew Smith

[rfurlonger]

Hi All

I have a similar issue on a DP P2 - just died but have been unable to raise Warkus. Any other suggestions for places to repair - Brisbane preferably but not necessarily?

[IanSav]

Hi Rfurlonger,

Mark (Warkus) is around but probably a little busy at the moment. Give him a chance and he will respond.

Regards,
Ian.

[warkus]

I am here, but it looks like I missed your contact and didnt respond. Sincere apologies.

I have emailed you!



Mark

[madmax]

A big thanks to Mark for going out of his way (twice!) to help me during my recent holiday in Perth.

The refurb'ed S1 was installed last night, good as new. My dad hadn't seen his VFD for nearly two years.

Legend status confirmed.

[rfurlonger]

Yet another P2 resurrected by warkus! Presented him with new challenges beyond the power supply but he managed to get the bits back together and its all good again.

Thanks heaps Mark!

[RoccaJay]

+1 for Mark's legendary work.
After going through the five stages of grief over my P1's error 0000, I discovered Mark who had it up and running again in no time, with no hassle from my end (all questions answered, clear instructions given). I am so appreciative to have my Wiz back... Thank you!

[hiker]

Another +1 - Mark saved our S1 from certain dead.

Thanks a lot!
Joerg

[yogi69]

I have been unable to get back in for a while and was fortunate enough to email via Mark's website and be able to make arrangements so that he could resurrect my P2. Thanks again your expertise, time and very reasonable charges - they are much appreciated,. Mike

[NigelSenior]

+1 form me on this Warkus is great

cheers

Nigel