I bought 100 of these to try.

Regarding old sockets... if you are adding the 470 ohm resistor to the original socket, and soldering one leg to the tit of the socket (along with moving the LDB return wire), that really fixes about 95% of all bad sockets. We use a dremel to sand the bayonette side of the original socket and run the resistor from there to the "tit" (which also gets sanded), and move the wire to the "tit" at the same time. sometimes we attach one side of the resistor to the 6volt buss wire (instead of the bayonette body.) Dealers choice...

I *never* buy an Altek lamp board. N E V E R. You have to work on the sockets anyway, why do i want some surface mount $100 thing? i don't! And hence i have to add the 470 ohm resistors... but if you're working on the sockets anyway, it's two birds with one stone type of thing.

But that all said, i think these lamp boards may be a good answer too. Hence I'm giving them a go. It's twice the cost of an LED and a resistor (on a modified stock socket), but these should increase controlled lamp reliability quite a bit.

If i was making these, i would have installed the 470 ohm resistor, surface mount style. if you didn't want the resistor, with a simple soldering iron, you could easily remove the surface mount resistor ("flick it off"), in just about 1 second. in addition, i would have had two holes installed underneath the SMD led... just in case the user want to "flick off" the SMD and install a conventional LED.... say a colored variety.