News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:Capacitor plague by pyoung on Friday May 17, 2013 @07:43PM (#5727263)
This is crazy, are there any comprehensive lists of devices that were affected by this? I am a little curious to see what devices, of many that have failed, may have been affected by this. Not that it would really change anything at this point.
Re:Capacitor plague by IvyMike on Friday May 17, 2013 @08:05PM (#5727333)
Not comprehensive, but the premade recap kits at badcaps.net has a lot of the more popular devices listed.

Additionally, I've seen at least three home routers from friends and family fail because of bad capacitors--visibly blown, and in two cases I replaced the caps and they started working again. (In the other case I just threw it out.)

http://www.badcaps.net/pages.php?vid=21

Re:Capacitor plague by zdw on Friday May 17, 2013 @07:55PM (#5727296)
Basically it's a good deal of the devices in the "iMac G5, Athlon XP, Pentium-4 with HyperThreading" era, or at least that's when I saw it the worst.

Laptops generally weren't affected, as SMD capacitors generally aren't electrolytic.

Re:Capacitor plague by fein on Friday May 17, 2013 @09:14PM (#5727514)
I used to do desktop support for a University, in which my daily job was reclaiming and sifting through hordes of gx270's and gx260's to find working mobos.

I swear they made the cases on those things out of razor blades. I probably could have replace the electrolytic material in most of the blown caps with my own blood.

Re:Capacitor plague by mey on Friday May 17, 2013 @07:48PM (#5727274)
I probably used to have a stack of devices just in my house that would qualify for these, from desktop mobo's, graphic cards and routers. I've probably lost $5k personally over the last 10 years to this, of course almost always out of warranty period.
Re:Capacitor plague by ojiikun on Friday May 17, 2013 @09:35PM (#5727557)
It wasn't just computing equipment. I have hand-repaired a dozen sets of amplifiers and powered studio monitor speakers made between '02 and '06 that just needed $2 worth of caps replaced despite the manufacturer quoting $250+ for authorized repairs.

In about half the cases it was a combined failure of the caps being el-cheapo and also the board design placing them far too close to heat-generating components. Fortunately, it is still cents on the dollar to replace with a higher temp-specced part if you know how to wield an iron.

Re:Capacitor plague by renanbirck on Friday May 17, 2013 @08:04PM (#5727329)
I have lost some Pentium 4 motherboards (and video cards from the same era) to this. Don't remember the specific models, sadly.