35s with a broken Enter key... worth repairing?

[Jeff O.]

(10-30-2014 01:15 PM)John Galt Wrote:  

Quote:Or, as I’m sure some will suggest, buy a 30b converted to a wp34s from Eric Rechlin.

Uh oh... you just complicated things.

At first glance it looks perfect. Please tell me it's the answer to my prayers. Since parting with my 41CX I haven't found the "perfect" calculator and wound up with a proliferation of them like you did.

Not sure if I can provide spiritual guidance, but I can say that the 34s does a lot of things right. I pointed you to the fully built version on Eric's site, which includes the crystal. The crystal makes reliable communication with the PC emulator possible, so you can upload and download programs developed on PC and vice versa. It is fun to program (as evidenced by the fact that I spent a month or more fiddling with programs to solve the HHC 2014 programming challenge). Be aware that the keys are re-labelled with stickers, and there is a full overlay on the keyboard. These may eventually show wear, but if you buy an extra overlay or two from Eric, you could always replace them in the future if necessary. Note that you can get into a 34s more cheaply. A while ago the 30b was being sold for around $10 somewhere on the internet, and they seem to be available for around $20 from Amazon at the moment. You would need to buy some overlays from Eric, and find someone to flash it into a 34s for you. Without the crystal, I have found that communication is unreliable, so unless you are good at soldering super small components (the crystals are about the size of a grain of sand in my opinion), probably best to just buy the whole thing from Eric.