[ale] Bad capacitors in computer motherboards

[Michael Smith]

What are the signs of a faulty capacitor?

<Begin Short Rant Here>
I ask this because I had an ASUS P5RD2-VM board that I just sent back to
newegg that would crash randomly.  I thought it might be a driver but it
started crashing in safe mode in Windows XP.  I couldn't even install any
type of linux on it.  It would hang when copying the files over to the
hard drive(on ubuntu, fedora, and suse) from the CDROM.  I ran several
memory testing tools and all tests resulted in no errors.  I ran prime95
in XP and it never would crash ehne I ran it(and the temps remained pretty
low) but if I left the computer on for a day it would crash.  I debugged
the memory dumps in XP and they would show different error locations.  I
tried removing all hardware except for the CDROM, memory and hard drive
and it still crashed(the mb has on board video).  I tried swapping hard
drives, power supplies and various cables also. Since it would crash after
several hours I thought that it might be heat related but after logging
the mb and cpu temps to a file I realized that the temps were well within
the normal range.
Anyways I sent the memory and the motherboard back because I couldn't
resolve the problem.  I tried for 2 months to get it working.
</End Short Rant Here>


> Several motherboard manufactures had a bad run of caps (gray market)
> that went bad in a short time.
>
> Check with the maker of your mother board as most of them will fix it
> for you.
>
> I've had an Asus and a Abit repaired.  What they do most of the time is
> to send you an exchange mb right away.
>
> On Tue, 2006-10-31 at 12:45 -0500, deritchie at earthlink.net wrote:
>> Chris,
>>    if you are looking for bad capacitors, the best device to do this
>> with a ESR meter. ESR stands for
>> Equivalent Serial Resistance - as electrolytics go bad, this rises over
>> time. The good news is that the
>> replacement caps are relatively cheap and easy to replace if you are
>> handy with a soldering iron....
>>
>> -- Dave Ritchie
>>
>>
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