Today's picture-o-the-day is of the failing capacitors on the motherboard I just replaced in one of the computers. After I got this board out of the computer I was looking at it and thougt some of the capacitors did not look quite right.
The capacitors are the dark blue cans on the left and the right of the picture. The caps on the left all look good, while those on the right look bad as they are bulging on the top, and appear to be leaking crud.
I vaguely recalled reading an article a while back on their being a bunch motherboards failing because of bad capacitors. Turns out it is a case of industrial espionage, and the article I'd seen was from the February 2003 issue of IEEE Specturm
Probing around the web I'm left with the impression this is a fairly common problem. On guy has apparently setup a business to repair motherboards, and his site has some interesitng pictures of failed capacitors. Also found a PCStats.com site that had some pictures of capacitors bulging like mine.
So, next time I have a computer go flakey, I'm going to check the caps on the motherboard first, if it's likely the motherboard was manufactured around 2001-2003. Also might try and repair the caps on this motherboard and build up another computer one day. As they're not real small parts replacing the capacitors would probably get me a working motherboard from what is now essentially junk. The economics of it are not very good as a new notherboard these days can be had for about $60.
Comments to: Bill Tracey (bill@ewjt.com)
Copyright © Bill Tracey 2004