Tinkering with capacitors
Yesterday I finally had the time to shop for replacement capacitors for the Dell desktop I bought for a file server, whose 5 capacitors were swollen.
Somehow electronic parts shops are all grouped together on the same street in this city, stretching for a couple hundred meters on both sides. I needed 5 capacitors of 2200 microfarads at 6.3 volts. Armed with patience and enjoying the warmth of the late autumn sun, I went through all the shops in a few hours. It’s pretty difficult to find capacitors for such a low voltage; some shops only carried from 10 or 16 volts up, others only from 50 up.
I started with largest electronic parts distributors. One didn’t have what I needed, another had the 10 volt kind - so I bought 10 of them for about $4. Cheap for a reason: their brand is “NA.” Not Applicable? Yikes. I’d better find alternate options.
Across the street, a smaller shop carried the kind I wanted - 6.3 volts. A bit more expensive, I bought only 5 of them for $4, but I wasn’t confident they were any better. They are dark blue with golden markings, made by “Kingcon.” Never heard of this one either, but they look a lot like those I’ve seen swelling up, and the brand sounds a lot like the 5 faulty capacitors in the Dell, “Nickicon.”
On a side note, what were Foxconn thinking when they picked “Nickicon” as a component supplier for manufacturing motherboards for Dell?!
Anyways, I went through the other stores, many being specialized in audio parts - speakers, amplifiers, specialty audio cables and connectors, and ultra-high performance electronic components for hi-fi audio devices. In such a small shop I found the kind of capacitors I needed, but this time a well-known, trusted brand: Jamicon. Clearly, these capacitors were nearly $1 a piece, but it’s money well spent.
Later in the day, I replaced the faulty capacitors on the motherboard with these Jamicon gems, powered up the desktop and… it started beeping at me. For a few seconds, I froze. Then I looked at the 4 diagnostic LEDs on the back of the Dell - two orange, two green. I looked up the pattern in the troubleshooting section of the manual and sighed with relief: “Bad memory.” I knew one of the memory modules has been acting weird, and this time I got proof: self-check identified two faulty locations. After taking the module out, everything worked perfectly.
Now I’ve got a new story to tell, a working file server, 15 capacitors I don’t need, and a deffective SDRAM memory module as a fancy keychain.
