I had a VP6 sent to me a week or so ago that displayed a totally new symptom... The board seemed perfectly stable, meaning it didn't freeze, BSoD, fail to POST, etc... From the outset, you'd think there was nothing wrong with it. When the customer first contacted me about it, I was doubting that capacitors were even the problem.
When it arrived, only 1 cap was showing the physical signs, and they were very mild. The only one showing physical faults was capacitor EC27, a 1000uF 16v cap. All the rest appeared normal.
Anyway, this new symptom was extreme data corruption. Everytime it would boot, Windows would complain that .NLS files were corrupt or missing, and when it would finish booting, it would complain of errors reading the registry. The strange thing is that the system and OS would not crash! I ran the burn-in cycle, and the board passed without a hiccup. However, if I attempted to benchmark the HDD's or defrag using Diskeeper 8, those programs would crash, not the system.
I tested this with drives on the RAID controller, standard ATA, and even a SCSI drive, and they ALL did it!
I've never seen this symptom before, so I recapped it anyway just to see what it would do afterward... I checked each of the old capacitors with my Sencore LC102 cap analyzer, and they were all far out of tolerances and clearly unusable.
After recapping the board, all the data corruption issues were cured. If you're experiencing anything similar to that with a VP6 or any other board, doubting your capacitors are the root, you might look again! Even if your capacitors look normal in appearance!
When it arrived, only 1 cap was showing the physical signs, and they were very mild. The only one showing physical faults was capacitor EC27, a 1000uF 16v cap. All the rest appeared normal.
Anyway, this new symptom was extreme data corruption. Everytime it would boot, Windows would complain that .NLS files were corrupt or missing, and when it would finish booting, it would complain of errors reading the registry. The strange thing is that the system and OS would not crash! I ran the burn-in cycle, and the board passed without a hiccup. However, if I attempted to benchmark the HDD's or defrag using Diskeeper 8, those programs would crash, not the system.
I tested this with drives on the RAID controller, standard ATA, and even a SCSI drive, and they ALL did it!
I've never seen this symptom before, so I recapped it anyway just to see what it would do afterward... I checked each of the old capacitors with my Sencore LC102 cap analyzer, and they were all far out of tolerances and clearly unusable.
After recapping the board, all the data corruption issues were cured. If you're experiencing anything similar to that with a VP6 or any other board, doubting your capacitors are the root, you might look again! Even if your capacitors look normal in appearance!
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