On Tue, 22 Nov 2011 14:03:41 -0000, Martin Brown wrote:

On 22/11/2011 13:46, Lieutenant Scott wrote:
On Tue, 22 Nov 2011 08:12:20 -0000, Martin Brown
wrote:


More likely that the capacitors are dodgy Taiwanese clones using a
stolen electrolyte formulation that was subtly incorrect leading to
premature failure of PSUs and motherboards. They got everywhere.
See for example:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capacitor_plague

Is that what happened to huge batches of Dell motherboards? I had 70
boards replaced under warranty, then replaced the capacitors on a
further 20 that had passed the warranty.

I was careful not to mention any brandnames as are most reports of this
problem which was really rather bad around 2002-3.

Why not mention brand names? Dell sold computers with dodgy caps in them. It's a fact. They were however good enough to replace the affected boards, and actually extended the warranty for that fault by a year.

http://spectrum.ieee.org/computing/h...p-motherboards

I guess in a less stressful situation they take longer to fail.

At the time nobody knew (or would admit) what the problem was. Maybe the motherboard design used caps that should have been rated higher?

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