It’s been awhile since I’ve dealt with the capacitor plague. I recently inherited this elderly (1.8GHz Pentium 4, 1GB SDRAM, 40GB hard drive) box from a friend who is now happily rocking out with a new computer powered by a much more modern and power-friendly dual-core AMD CPU. Naturally, the first thing I did (after cackling and rubbing my hands together with glee) was to open the case and shove the ribbon cables aside. Oh. Hello.
I’m surprised it still runs. In fact, as far as I can tell, it runs as steady as a rock, although how a rock can run is beyond me. (After all, a rock has no legs.) Of course, if it had been some of the larger caps near the CPU, it probably wouldn’t be running very long at all.
Time to pull out memtest86+ and prime95.
“When Caps Go Bad…”
Most likely these are the Audio or other non essential caps. Usually the CPUs caps are along or close to the CPU and heatsink.
This board would not be hard to fix, if its still posting. Just grab some caps from http://www.badcaps.net and match the Microfarad and the Voltages and make sure to solder the white side/stripe to the ground “-” side. You can, for example use higher volt caps in place of lower volts, but stay spot on the uF ratings. Example would be using 16 volts in place of 10 volts or 10 volts in place of 6.5 volts. But do not try to use Lower volt caps to replace higher volts, they will pop.
There is a great write up about it on the Badcaps site. Not only does this work with Motherboards but also the new Flat Panel Monitors and TV’s. And also power supplies in all electronics.
Here is the link to Badcaps tutorial. Its a great crash coarse.
http://www.badcaps.net/pages.php?vid=31