PCs Plagued by Bad Capacitors 335
Hawaiian Rules writes "CNET has a story
detailing a new threat to Dell PCs, Apple iMacs and other computers with Intel boards. This has been documented on BadCaps.net for some time, but the article also discusses what to do if you suspect you've got a case of the bad caps."
More than just Intel boards (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:More than just Intel boards (Score:2, Interesting)
On our systems with UPS's this seems to happen less often, my guess is the cleaner power puts less stress on the board.
Re:If you don't wanna get ripped off. (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Modern Times (Score:3, Interesting)
This has been a real hassle for me. (Score:3, Interesting)
Well, I roped them together into a really nice Beowulf cluster for running my simulations and for the past 2 years I've had nodes die left and right. I'm sure the machines are out of warranty now, but I really hope Dell fixes these machines. I seem to remember Gateway doing this back in 2002. Now that the official word is out, maybe the computer department will take my word for it. What does a silly physicist know about computers and motherboards anyway?
Mike.
Re:More than just Intel boards (Score:2, Interesting)
That's nothing. I work at a university where we purchased hundreds of the Dell GX270 a couple years ago. In the last year we've had almost all of the fail on us (we are expecting all to fail in time). The worst part is that we've had to wait up to 4 weeks to get warranty service when we paid for NBD service. The hold up we were told was due to backorder.
The warranty service tech tells us the problem is with the faulty capacitors. Gotta love how businesses screw themselves when they trade quality for cheap, unreliable parts.
Re:If you don't wanna get ripped off. (Score:5, Interesting)
On the theme of new and expensive, I'm a little suprised that motherboard MFR's that make high end boards for enthusiasts (you know the ones, with ugly flourecent plastic bits and silver paint and whatnot) haven't used any SMC caps for these boards. You only see them on prototypes. I'd think if there was a market for a motherboard with yellow PCI slots and a purple PCB that this would be a much more attractive option.
On the other hand, I suppose it costs nothing to make lime green and orange connectors, but actually making something nice would cost a few dollars.
Re:More than just Intel boards (Score:3, Interesting)
My in-laws' Netvista fell over last week, lots of magic blue smoke and 3 stuffed capacitors. The twin of that machine blew up 4 months earlier.
The air flow & knock sensors in my car went - $1450 repair bill. Is there going to be a class action? If so, that was the capacitors.
Gotta go... my washing machine is making funny noises.
Re:After I knew what they looked like (Score:3, Interesting)
These are easily tested using the patented Bugs Bunny artillery shell quality control inspection procedure: Tap sharply with a hammer and if you are still alive, write "dud"..er.."good" on the side with a sharpie.
Seriously, this sounds like a double foulup by Nichicon. Overfill with electrolyte so there is insufficient airspace for thermal expansion, then screw up the emergency vent hole at the bottom so the thing has no choice but to burst. I've blown plenty of electrolytics in my day (midnight soldering sessions, reversed polarity, yada) About 9/10 times the vent hole blows first. Maybe 1/10 times the whole can blows off the base. Getting the can to deform this badly without either happening is pretty impressive.
Me too - mine was a Soyo SY-K7V DRAGON Plus (Score:3, Interesting)
What needs to be remembered is that often a system with bad caps can damage other components, from memory to the CPU to hard drives, even cards attached to the PCI bus. This was devastating when it happened to me.
Re:More than just Intel boards (Score:2, Interesting)
So, Saying "AMD too" is not correct. Compair Intel boards to ASUS, Chaintech, Dell, Giga-Byte....
Re:it's not that hard to fix (Score:3, Interesting)
The best looking cap explosion I ever saw, was a tantalum which I accidentally soldered in the wrong way, while building a digital frequency meter.
Once it came time to test... a small bit of the top popped off and a silver molten stream of what looked like beads of mercury came gushing out and off that stream came lots of smoke. It looked so cool I half did not want to switch it off. ; )
Re:More than just Intel boards (Score:5, Interesting)
i had one (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:mod parent up (Score:3, Interesting)
I love trawling through ebay for certain older Sun's, DEC's, etc.
Whenever I buy something here is Australia from a department store, especially from one like Big-W, Target or K-Mart, I am left thinking on the way home, "is it going to work when I get it out of the box? If it does, for how long?"
I bought a DVD player just recently from Big-W. I think it was rebadged to AWA. The model was on display, which at the time was being used to run a PSP promotional DVD which was displaying in only shades of purple on the cheapo flat screen TV it was hooked up to. I asked the lady if the TV or the DVD player was broken and she said they were fine, it was the promotional DVD which was done all in shades of purple (in my head I heard Dr. Evil say, riiiigh-T). I asked if they ever got returns on that model DVD player and she said she knew of none.
I should have realised, that she would not know. She is in sales, she is not at the huge returns desk near the front with the long line of less than happy customers with various "goods", hmmm okay "items" for return. I asked the nice young girl behind the counter about this model of DVD player which I was returning (because it would not recognise ANY DVD, not even the two I had just recently purchased with zero scratches) as to how many returns she had seen and she told me that she had seen lots of those units come back.
I also noticed this time what looked like the same PSP promotional DVD playing, except in full colour!
This is the third component DVD player I have had fail.
price hasn't equaled quality since your grandpa's day when everything was built out of painted steel and machined parts.
Reminds me of something I have been saying for a few years...
"You rarely get what you pay for, but you usually pay for what you get."
I recently spent $5,000 Aussie on a Sony notebook. Admittedly the display is spectacular and I expected the Sony to be a decent product. It mostly is, however it is a little flimsy. After only a few months of use the paint on the palm rests is wearing off. For one third to one quarter the cost of a decent small brand new Japanese car (did I say decent? Sorry, my expectations must be slowly sliding down in this new World), it would have been nice for this machine to at least have a metal top and bottom. I am fearful of moving it for the wear from flexing the chassis. My girlfriends Thinkpad has also broken all around the screen where the hinges are.
I like the look and feel of Powerbooks, but even they have issues, since their metal is just thin enough to cause permanent apparent warping in some cases, so I have heard.
I want quality and I am willing to pay for it! But I can't find it! It seems that I would need to, as you suggest with the industrial comment, purchase a hardened computer designed mostly for the US military if I want any decent level of sturdiness. But then I'd be paying 4-6 times the price of the consumer equivalent for a very heavy and strange looking machine. Fair enough, I expect that stuff to be super expensive due to the added hardness and limited economies of scale, but surely with the economies of scale which the consumer gear manufacturers can leverage, they could at least give us something acceptable.
Re:Problem's been around for awhile. (Score:3, Interesting)
Faulty components can really cause problems for manufacturers. Slashdot recently ran an article about digital cameras failing because of faulty Sony CCD sensors [slashdot.org]. The problem didn't just affect Sony cameras as several manufacturers used Sony's chips in their products.
Re:Nothin new here. Just like Car Makers. (Score:1, Interesting)
It's pretty normal in all fields for high performance to equal tighter tolerances and less room for error. It's more than just "the good ol days when things were made properly", although that is a factor too. There's a shitty cycle of consumers shopping for the lowest price and companies compromising products in order to compete. I've noticed that if you try to buy outside of that cycle you pay way more, instead of just the cost of better components and a slightly more complex design. This must be because a slightly more expensive product doesn't acheive a high enough sales volume. But these better products aren't enough better to account for the big price jump. And so the vicious cycle continues. Booooo.
knowledge is not a judgement substitute (Score:3, Interesting)
A lot of knowledge never makes up for bad judgement. It's broke, what you do won't make things worse. This is a case of little to lose and something to gain.
The board is dead or flaky because it has cheap caps. Do you think putting new cheap caps will be worse? The worst you can do is screw up the traces with a cheap soldering iron. Then your dead board remains dead and you move on.
Back in 2002, I fixed a board this way. The cheapest caps from a reputable dealer cost me less than $10 and the board still works. I had little to lose and some time. It was worth the time and money. It cost much less than buying a new motherboard. It has run continuously and still serves as an email spam filter and back up computer.