[NTLUG:Discuss] Capacitor Plague [Was: Re: slightly OT - external USB hard drive]

[Dennis Myhand]

Fred James wrote:
> Robert Citek
> Thank you for the link - not sure it has anything to do with my current 
> issue, but it is interesting ...
> Question (for all) ..
>     If a capacitor fails can it cause flaky behavior (similar to memory 
> leaks and random frozen screens), or would it not just stop all 
> together, causing the computer to not function?
> (I really don't know the answer to that one)
> Regards
> Fred James
> 

It depends on which capacitor fails.  Had one mobo with flaky caps that 
would crash when the caps got too hot.  It would restart until I changed 
the settings in BIOS as to what to do on hardware failure.  I have 
replaced a couple of boards which just quit, but there were more than 
one cap that failed on each board.  One that I have in my classroom to 
show what bad caps look like has 9 caps with cap crap on top of them, or 
are swollen, or both.  It just depends which cap fails.  HTH (But I 
doubt that it does, really), Dennis in Victoria