Yesterday my pc went down. Some people might see it as a reason to buy a new computer, but I like to give my desktop pc's a very looooong life.
Upon taking it apart, I found two blown capacitors. Thanks to flashlight modding learned here, I knew to add a dap of solder to help heat and remove them. Someone else mentioned salvaging components from old electronics, so I pulled out an old unused motherboard and pulled what I need off of it.
I also saw a bunch of resisters on the old motherboard that should be great for modding sense resisters on a couple of my flashlights, but I'm going to try something else learned here. Removing them in bulk with hot air. I don't have a rework station or a butane soldering iron, but a hot air gun should work. There are a couple toroids too...not sure how I can use those yet.
I love Newegg. They should complete order history and keep up the old product pages. My current motherboard was purchased in 2007. It replaced a motherboard purchased in 2004.
I may be able to keep this current computer alive for a few more years, but I don't think I'll keep it more than another two years. My needs aren't much, but this computer is struggling with streaming videos (no HD, no way) and struggles with two monitors. The replacement needs to handle full HD streaming video from any source on one full HD screen, browse without apparent slowdowns on a second monitor with greater than HD resolution, have a small window for a webcam, and handle more hard drives. The only thing I'd have leftover if I tried upgrading this computer is the hard drives, maybe the CPU heatsink and the mouse/keyboard.
In the meantime I'll be getting a Windows and Android tablet. Just a tablet, not a tablet pc. No current need for laying out the extra cash for a tablet pc.
Great idea!
I do. This is the first time I've replacement components on a board though. What's a sealed capacitor? Mine looked like cylinders with an X on top.
There are a TON of threads at badcaps.net, those above only scratch the surface. I’ve replaced crappy caps on countless pieces of equipement from computer motherboards, networking equipement, monitors and HDTV’s, computer PSU’s, …… the list goes on.
Thanks lilkevin715. It's taken me a while to figure out what solid polymer capacitors were, although I didn't directly try to figure out what they are.
I ended up taking a deeper look into this because I had two other caps go bad, although one was a cap that I had recycled from an even older motherboard. What I learned was that aluminum electrolytic capacitors have a liquid electrolyte in them, and they dry out. When they dry out, the cap goes poof. I think I've gambled enough, so I'll go ahead and replace the rest of the capacitors at once instead of waiting for them to fail one by one because I'm likely to cause other damage to my motherboard if I remove it every time a cap goes bad.
Anyhow, the full name for it is conductive polymer aluminum solid electrolytic capacitors. Two really good examples are the Nichicon LE and Nichicon LF. Their biggest advantage is extremely low ESR. Their ripple current is fantastic too. These seem to be the most commonly used caps in new motherboards, although low end boards still have some aluminum electrolytic caps. Their only problem is low capacitance that tops out at 820 μF for caps above 5V. I suspect new boards use more of these caps in parallel to allow the use of lower capacitance caps.
My older board needs some higher capacitance caps, and I'll probably go for the Nichicon HZ. It's a more traditional aluminum electrolytic capacitor, but still has nice ESR and ripple current. Unfortunately Digikey doesn't sell the entire HZ series in small quantities, so I may have to go with higher ESR caps from the Panasonic ZLJ series. The nice thing about the ZLJ series is that they're rated for 9000 hours where the LE, LF and HZ are rated for 2000 hours. The amount of ripple current on my board could bring down its battery life though. Lots of ripple creates more heat, which reduces longevity. The converse is true too. Since the LE, LF and HZ have low ESR and high ripple current, they should heat less and live much longer than 2000 hours.
Thanks man! Saving money on my computer means I can spend more money on flashlights. :D
If this information helps others, that's great, but I also post information for myself. I've searched information more than a few times in the last ~20 years, only to find a post where I answered my own question in the past. I let the internet remember for me.
I'm not interested in building a new pc right now, but fwiw, all my pc's have been built with parts from Newegg since 2004. The first pc I built for myself was shopped from vendors found on pricewatch.com. Some of those parts may have come from cdw or tigerdirect, but I know my monitor was from some little shop...in Florida iirc. I used that computer until old replacement parts became more expensive than new parts.