Bad capacitors, take three
It happened again.
The first time it was an accidental discovery. I was happy to think that I have fixed the problem.
The second time it was a surprising discovery, but I was convinced that the second blow will finally kill the monster.
But it didn’t. And a few days ago I discovered that another two of the original capacitors left on the motherboard look like a finger stung by a bee.
That got me mad. Really mad. I definitely ain’t gonna patch this motherboard for a third time. It’s time to stop trying to resurrect the dead and let the priest light a candle.
Darned capacitors.
I was planning to replace the core components of my PC with modern stuff — a new motherboard, an Intel Core 2 Duo processor, some DDR2 memory and probably a reasonable video card on PCI Express. That’d give me a lot of juice, less heat, less noise, and a bundle of features such as 10 USB2 ports on-board and Serial ATA 300. It looked like a big investment and I was waiting for prices to drop, using the old PC in the mean time. After all, I only get to spend maybe 6 to 8 hours per week at my home computer these days, so $1000 sitting in an unused computer would be a stupid idea.
But the old PC went belly-up, thanks to the effin’ faulty capacitors. And I needed an immediate solution. So I bought a cheap motherboard for Socket A (pretty much the only model I could still find in stock anyway), which will keep me running for some time. In need of space, I also bought a new 320 GB hard drive on PATA, so the pressure of SATA is gone for now.
Effin’ capacitors.
On a side note, yesterday I bought a second hand Dell OptiPlex G150, a nice Pentium III in a slim case, to become a flexible file server (and maybe a print server, and media center, and whatever else I want to throw at it — like, running a couple more virtual machines on it with Microsoft Virtual PC). Its inner workings are wonderful, the case is so well thought and the airflow keeps the system cool with one fan for video card, hard drive and power supply. Everything inside is made by Foxconn and labeled as such. The motherboard is a little smaller than mATX form factor, and has only 5 capacitors on it.
They’re swollen.
*sigh*
Now, does anyone want to buy an old Epox 8K3A motherboard (Socket A, VIA KT333 & 8233 chipset, 266 MHz maximum processor FSB and 333 MHz maximum memory frequency) which has gone through surgery twice and still needs (at least) a third intervention?
