Viglen PC with bad caps

[Tom41]

I'm not sure who made the motherboard for this PC, but the PC is made by Viglen and has a Pentium III processor. I use this PC mainly as a spare, in case one of my main PCs dies, though I have left it on overnight a few times doing big downloads

Most of the caps on this board are made by Tayeh - listed in the bad manufacturers list. Two of the caps have actually blown, catastrophic failure. The bottom cap is visibly bulged and has a small amount of electrolyte spilling out of the top. The top cap isn't bulged at all, but is pointing at a strange angle.

I can clearly see that one or both of the capacitors have blown the bung out of the bottom, and some electrolyte has spilled. This is worrying, since electrolyte is a conductor, and it's running dangerously close to the torroid coil (and over another solder pad)

[MD Willington]

Re: Viglen PC with bad caps

Does the PC have a model number? like Viglen ### etc

You could also download and run a few utilities that could maybe hash out what the hardware is:

Everest Home edition
http://www.lavalys.com/

Belarc Advisor
http://www.belarc.com/free_download.html

They seem to fair well in looking up who made the parts in PC's.

MD

[Tom41]

Re: Viglen PC with bad caps

From what I can gather, the machine is a Viglen Contender P3 650. I assume the P3 650 bit means it's a Pentium III running at 650MHz. I am currently running Windows NT 4.0 on it, though I have the drive formatted using FAT so I can DOS-boot it (with a boot disk) when necessary.

What's strange is that despite the capacitors having catastrophically failed, the PC still works perfectly! There's just one issue I'm having - if I open a DOS box, and switch it to full-screen mode, the system freezes on a black screen. Nothing will get it back apart from prodding the front-panel Reset button with a pen. Does this sound like a capacitor issue or is it more likely a software/hardware configuration error?

Also, when shutting down, it will sometimes stick on a plain green background screen with nothing else on it. No 'Please wait while saving' message, no 'now safe to turn off' message, and the mouse stops moving. Other times it shuts down perfectly, and the APM turns it off.

[Rainbow]

Re: Viglen PC with bad caps

Bad caps can result in various weird problems.

[willawake]

Re: Viglen PC with bad caps

you can clean the electrolyte off the board using alcohol and cotton swabs. This is best done when you remove the offending capacitor as then you can clean where it was sitting also. I have recapped boards which had electrolyte leaked all down the board and dried, following recapping and cleaning of the electrolyte they became perfectly stable.

whatever your software problems it would be a good idea to fix those caps at least or better replace all dodgy brands on the board for a final proper job.

that machine would run win2k nice if you give it 256 ram.