So the laptop died, and I spent several hours piecing together good components from several old boxes to get back on line while the laptop is in the shop. In the process, I think I discovered why one box died in the first place… the capacitors appear to have blown, they’ve leaked all over themselves.
So question the first - I should be able to find replacement capacitors and solder them in, right? Do I need to be particular about the types of capacitor I get, or will anything work assuming the specs match up? How about solder, will just anything work or do I need to be particular?
And questions the second and third - assuming the capacitors are the problem, and I can get the board functional again, I’m thinking about seeing if I can use it again, bring the assorted goodies up to something vaguely near modern standards. Checking the Abit archives, though, I’m confused. The specs indicate the board is good for a processor up to 1.33 gig, but thats actually an Athlon 1600 on it right now… was I never getting the full 1.6 gig from it, or can I go higher? How much higher? Also, specs indicate the board is good for 3.5 gig of RAM… I’ve got 4 DIMM slots, should I just cram 4 1 gig sticks in there? Or try to mix and match sticks to get as close as I can to 3.5 gig w/o going over?
And good sweet holy crap, RAM is cheap! I just wanted to mention that, seeing as how I think I paid over $100 each for the pair of 512mb DIMMS that are in it now. Sheesh.
I have actually repaired a couple MBs with bad caps. (The most extreme was a 386 MB that popped a ceramic cap. Smoke and everything. Replaced it and the board continued to work fine. Weird.) It is not for the beginner. There has been a severe problem in recent years with electronics with cheap electrolytic caps. (There’s even a “www.badcaps.net” web site about them.) First they bulge, then the leak. If they have leaked, things might be so bad that other components are now damaged.
Some caps in computers are special, e.g., low ESR. Also, replacing them is tricky. The holes in the board connect multiple layers and if you don’t solder right, then things don’t work. A low melting point solder is a good idea.
If most the preceding doesn’t make sense to you, then don’t try it.
If I fixed such a board, I would only use it for occasional trial use. Not for day-to-day.
Note: Athlon numbers are Pentium “equivalent” speed ratings. Not actual clock speeds. I see no point in even trying to come close to maxing out the RAM.
Not necessarily.
The iMac G5 was plagued by these bad caps - huge numbers of them were repaired by simply* replacing the caps.
*It took the largest soldering iron I own - a 200W stained-glass iron - to desolder the caps on an iMac motherboard. I never was able to suck the solder out of the ground holes, even with my $1000 vacuum desoldering station. I finally ended up drilling the solder out with a carbide drill bit, by hand.