I usually wouldn’t think twice about trashing a borked motherboard, but I was recently informed about a pretty common issue with brand name PCs that happened a few years ago involving cheap capacitors. Apparently, the fluid used inside some capacitors tends to release a gas, which results in the capacitor bulging or leaking fluid onto the board. I wasn’t so sure about it until a friend brought their PC in for repair this week. It’s a cute little all-in-one NEC home computer, and it had been having power issues so I suspected the power supply was dodgy and it could be fixed pretty soon. They even brought in a spare computer that they bought as junk on Yahoo Auctions for parts! Strangely, both computers exhibited the same dodgy power behavior – pressing the power button result in anywhere from 1-5 seconds of fans whirring and then it would cut it out straight away. After testing each power supply I found them both to be fine though, so what on earth could be causing it? I stripped everything down to the bar motherboard, processor and memory to see if maybe the LCD was faulty and trying to draw too much power, bu still no luck. Then I inspected the motherboard closer and found these:
See how the top of the capacitors has slightly expanded, and you can see some kind of black stuff leaking out? That’s not a good thing, and finally I have become a believer in the bursting capacitors problem. It wasn’t just one either – it was a line of 3 capacitors in exactly the same place on BOTH the motherboards. One of them has also totally burst and was leaking this crap all onto the motherboard too though.
So what can be done? Well, I’m heading out to buy some replacement capacitors today to see if I can just swap them out, but I must admit I’ve never attempted anything like this before. If it doesn’t work, I expect I’ll use most of the innards to build them a cheap tower with a new motherboard. After a little bit of research, it seems a lot of brand name PCs are affected by these kind of problems, and I’m sure it’s connected to the bad heat flow inside these things. The moral of the story is – don’t buy a brand pc, and don’t buy and all-in-one. They really do suck – they’re hard to upgrade, useless if one part breaks, and have all manner of heating issues. Please don’t choose a computer just because it looks “cute”.
