
Capacitor plague – Wikipedia - deegles
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capacitor_plague
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throwanem
Audio equipment got hit by this too. I scored a very nice surround receiver
and speaker set this way; someone had put it on the curb, so I took it home
for examination, and $20 in replacement caps later it was good to go. Lasted
me years, until an evil-minded cat threw up in it.

~~~
isostatic
Quite normal on a night shift to replace hundreds of surface mount capacitors
from a calrec sound desk. Well normal for my colleagues - my soldering is
terrible, I spent the time writing perl instead.

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breakingcups
This is also an issue on the original Xbox game console. It is especially
exacerbated on a specific capacitor on the motherboard which is asked to
perform above it's specifications.

It is known to "pop" and splash acid all over the motherboard and ruining the
motherboard in the process.

Luckily it's only function is to keep time (for about 8 hours after
unplugging, then it dies and forgets the time anyway). The fix is very quick,
wiggle the capacitor until the legs break and remove it. I've done it for
about 8 boxes. This procedure is very, very common among collectors and
enthusiasts as the capacitor is not needed for normal operation and it's
usually not a matter of if the capacitor will blow, but when, leaving you with
a brick.

If you have an original Xbox console and would like to know more, search for
"Xbox clock capacitor removal", or message me.

(Common symptoms besides not turning on can also be: Not turning off. Turning
on or off randomly. Randomly ejecting the DVD tray. Always ejecting the DVD
tray and never allowing it to be closed. Never ejecting the DVD tray. Some or
all controller ports no longer functioning.

If your Xbox doesn't have these symptoms but it is forgetting the time after
turning it off, you should open your box as soon as possible and investigate
the capacitor.)

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cududa
When I was in High School our school district had a _ton_ of computers by
state grant (1 for every 2 students). One summer (2005 if I remember
correctly) the IBM desktops all started popping capacitors. Me and a few
technically inclined friends got a nice summer job out of identifying affected
machines, gathering them up, re-imaging them, and replacing them around the
district.

Funny to learn this was such a widespread issue

~~~
baddox
I worked tech support for my small public school district when I was a senior
in high school in 2004-5. I must have replaced at least a hundred motherboards
with this issue. Apparently they were covered under warranty (mostly HP
computers, I believe), but I wonder if there was any conpensation for labor.
Those things are tedious to replace in the slightly odd form factors they use
for education/enterprise workstations. Not that my labor was costing the
district too much ($6.50 an hour, which I considered a very generous premium
above minimum wage.)

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justifier
Whenever I have friends give me electronics stead throwing them away, without
actual data, id say 95% of the time it's a capacitor

I really wish manufacturing encouraged easy swap components stead filling
landfills

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BatFastard
Almost every one of my Samsung Monitors I bought between 2000 and 2007 has
experienced this problem. I went thru and replaced them and now my 17 year old
19 inch monitors work like a charm.

~~~
tomxor
I will never get this lucky charm obsession with miniature online success
stories.

~~~
ACow_Adonis
I used to <behaviour Y> and experience <problem Y>. But then I <solution X>.
Now I <happy-life X>.

There's a bot/AI application in there somewhere. Of course, this is one of
those "we spent so long thinking about whether we could, we didn't stop to ask
whether we should" type projects...

~~~
vayeate
There's probably money to be made there. Could use something similar to
generate realistic fake reviews.

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magila
This ended up having a lasting legacy as many motherboard manufactures
switched to Japanese made and/or polymer capacitors. They would tout this fact
in their marketing material as a sign of quality. Tech sites started noting
the source of a board's caps in their reviews. To this day you will sometimes
see "all solid capacitors" in the marketing literature for a motherboard.

~~~
dfox
It is slightly questionable whether this episode is really the cause for the
switch. Around the same time frame significantly faster switching transistors
became available which allowed DC-DC converters to reach higher efficiency by
increasing switching frequency, which has the nice side effect of requiring
smaller filtering capacitors at the expense of requiring lower ESL/ESR.

Also over past 5 years or so small chip low-voltage MLCCs became available in
previously unheard of capacities that are perfectly usable for many bulk
filtering applications with prices that are competitive with aluminium
electrolytics.

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tyingq
I don't know why, but bad electrolytic capacitors also sometimes have a fishy
smell.

~~~
inopinatus
IANAC but my research suggests the odour is due to the presence of amine salts
of boric acid in the electrolyte. Any chemists on hand to confirm or correct
this?

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sharpercoder
I remember a guy figuring out a fix for a specific motherboard. That type of
motherboard suffered especially from these problems. The guy got a few hunderd
of these, fixed around 95% of them and resold them.

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dictum
A similar phenomenon is that of swollen lithium ion batteries:
[https://duckduckgo.com/?q=swollen+battery](https://duckduckgo.com/?q=swollen+battery)

~~~
tzaman
A victim here. My 2007 MacBook Pro started to swell on the bottom after a
couple of years, didn't think much of it, it was a tiny bump at first, but
then it almost doubled in thickness so I replaced it with a cheap Chinese
knockoff (was broke at the time due to starting a startup), and the same thing
happened in about a year. Lesson learned.

~~~
tomxor
same in 2009 model, i'm using it right now, (without OS X of course). there is
now a 4-2mm lip on the underside where the battery panel is being pushed out.
I still get about 40mins and seems to have stopped swelling so what the heck
:P Anyway these days Apple sells those sort of things as "features"... lets
call it a "leg gripping lip" allows lap usage at strange angles.

~~~
TheSpiceIsLife
As a community services announcement: you should probably replace that battery
immediately.

It might never burn your house down while you sleep, but someone else might
read your comment and think it's okay.

~~~
tomxor
I most certainly will not.

Shorting, puncture and overcharge cause lipo fires. Expansion can lead to
puncture and shorting in stupid thin enclosures, this is in an inch thick
unsealed enclosure with lots of give which even pops off with little force,
containing a battery which has swollen around 1-2% of it's original volume.

This is not a consumer advice forum, it's hacker news...

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pcunite
This happened to me on a very popular brand of motherboard at the time. Now I
like it when I see Nichicon capacitors on the product description.

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wnevets
I remember getting replacement capacitors for a motherboard I bought during
that time, fortunately I never had to use them.

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paulie_a
I have nothing to add outside of some nostalgia: I once had a dual Celeron rig
that fell to this problem. It started with not turning on after hitting the
power button. Sometimes it took two to twenty times. I remember when it
finally died, after bartending a Phish concert near Milwaukee.

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karlshea
I remember a bunch of MSI motherboards I had slowly dying over a couple of
years because of this.

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ysleepy
I remember soldering in new caps into a PIII Abit Mainboard that stopped
working.

Good times... (haha maybe not)

But the issue was known to interested parties and generally publicised.

~~~
mitchty
I thought caps are generally the first thing you look at for any
failing/failed electronics? Least I tend to, its pretty easy to spot bulges in
electrolytic caps and pop em off then have things magically work again.

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vondur
I had a GeForce card at the time that died from the bad capacitor problems. I
also remember many iMac’s with failed capacitors.

~~~
katastic
I had _three_ of the same generation card die on me. The past and future
generations still work fine.

(7xxx/8xxx/9xxx series if I recall correctly.)

No problems with 560, 1060, or even really old cards like the MX series. So
"specific generation of capacitors" seems to line up with it pretty well. I
find it hard to believe that just that one chipset generation was terrible (as
opposed to OEM's using popular but faulty brand caps and getting burned by
it).

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qntty
Huh, I guess this might explain why several capacitors on my video card failed
around 2007.

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mightyoj
After reading this, the Dell Optiplex 745 comes to mind.

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mdip
I might not be the only person who remembers this time fondly for the profits
it gave me.

During this time I was doing a lot of computer repair for family friends and
other acquaintances that I volunteered with. Most of this work was unpaid for
various reasons (either "Family Obligation(tm)" or me helping out some folks
who didn't have enough money to pay for repair services). I often received a
"Thank You" for the free service of the "it's broken, but have it -- maybe you
can fix it" kind of variety[0]. Often, I'd explain that I couldn't do much
with these things and would politely refuse, but on occasion, I'd run into an
item that I knew I could sell broken on e-bay and recoup some cost, or I'd
encounter someone who was embarrassed at not being able to afford to pay and
would accept the item as a suitable gift to cover their pride.

Around 2006, I was given an exceptionally expensive plasma television from one
of these individuals and really wanted to fix it up, so I took it apart and
discovered that it was simply a case of some bulging capacitors. I have plenty
of experience with a soldering iron but these weren't even difficult soldering
jobs - they were _large_ caps that were obviously part of the power supply
component and having a box of these in the basement, I replaced them and ended
up with a nice television that used until a couple of years ago.

While initially researching this model of television, I ran across complaints
about failing capacitors which led me to some articles complaining about Dell
motherboards having similar problems and a lot of noise about this being an
industry epidemic, so I investigated the five or so PCs is my basement and
seven LCD monitors. In the case of the displays, every one of them had bad
caps on the PSU. In the case of the Dell PCs, it was motherboards. I fixed
each and sold them for a few hundred a piece. I ended up _buying_ a lot of
broken stock on eBay based on descriptions of why they were broken and picked
up a nice AVR, amp and sub-woofer that way saving at least 50% (I picked up
the $300 amp for $10, my best purchase).

I had _several_ of my own equipment die from this, including a SageTV media
streaming device, almost all of the first generation of which had 6-7 bad
caps. The lot of these sorts of problems started drying up around 2011/2012
for me, but I still encounter hardware that I suspect is a few bum caps away
from perfectly functional. I even had my secondary sub, purchased in 1996,
fail due to this.

[0] This happened more often than it didn't and was usually monitors. I
recovered data from a bum hard drive for an old lady who had _4_ different LCD
monitors ranging from 1024x760-1280x1080 in her basement, all capable of only
lighting the little LED in the front. It made no sense for her to have even
one of these, let alone five. Sometimes it was the old PC that was a year old
but failed and a replacement was gifted from the son-in-law for Christmas.

