Paul Nicholls

So at work we’ve had a Dell machine gradually dying, it randomly locks up whenever it feels like taking the video display with it - leaving us with a blank screen and unresponsive machine. This has been getting gradually worse over the last two months until finally this week it gave up completely and won’t stay on long enough to log in.

Googling for generic symptoms got us nowhere, and on the verge of re-installing windows we tried googling the Dell model number … and lo! People with our problem exactly on the Dell Community forums. So I’m sceptical, bulging capacitors?… never heard of it… But, open up the case (after fighting the stupid buttons to make it upon, damn GX270s..) and sure enough, all of our “X” headed capacitors are bulging and leaking!

Feeling somewhat proud we’d figured out what was wrong, and justifying the money we’d just spent buying a replacement machine we left it at that. The Dell machine was committed to The Great Spares Pile to be awarded a new mobo next time we happened to be at the suppliers.

With the excitement of yesterdays capacitors long forgotten, today’s work including trying to fix a machine which was experiencing trouble with random reboots of ever increasing frequency (now at the stage we rarely make it past the POST). Its not the hard drive, its not the memory, or the chip … so it looks like a mobo issue. Off chance I happened to notice the capacitors… they were bulging too.

A quick look on Farnell, and some tips from badcaps.net and it looks like we’ll be attacking it with a soldering iron after Easter Note to self, perhaps revise some more on capacitance for forthcoming Physics exam?