I made a vacation to the USA to visit my aunt and uncle and their kids. It was a wonderful vacation, as I had quite a lot of hardware stuff to play around there with! My uncle uses an old Dell Dimension 4800 (if I remember the model number correctly) as home computer. Now that PC should never die, as there is confidential data on it and stuff. But it ran soooo slow, and sometimes windows wouldn't even boot!
OK, I came to the conclusion that 68 processes in the BG when idling isn't too good of a windows configuration for a PC like this (P4 2.8GHz, 512MB DDR2-667), but why would Windows refuse to boot sometimes?
I opened the case and apart from everything being dusty over there, guess what?
Two, no THREE (One hidden below that green fan thingy) dead capacitors, two nichicons and one KZG or something like that (1000uF, 820uF and 1800uF). Two were buling and the third one hidden under the green plastic was leaking too.
Now I had to get new capacitors. I've never been to any place in the US that sell caps before, but I heard that RadioShack sells them. I didn't take a soldering iron with me, so I bought one there for, I think, 22 dollars, that had to do.
I bought 2x 1000uF (Crossing fingers that they would work) because they didn't have 820uF ones, and one assorted pack with a lot of caps in it, where one 1800uF was in. The capacitors they sold seemed to be either old or just extremely big for their kind. I know I'm risking near death again soon because these aren't competition for Rubycons, Sanyos or so, but, I guess it'll do for now.
It was difficult to get the big caps in there, but with a bit of bending here and there, it eventually worked.
I booted it up and oops. No picture?! Yellow LED?! ---- Ooooops, forgot to plug in the 4-pin CPU power plug. Meh, let's pretend that didn't happen
- So it worked, and I hope that it won't die soon 
OK, I came to the conclusion that 68 processes in the BG when idling isn't too good of a windows configuration for a PC like this (P4 2.8GHz, 512MB DDR2-667), but why would Windows refuse to boot sometimes?
I opened the case and apart from everything being dusty over there, guess what?
Two, no THREE (One hidden below that green fan thingy) dead capacitors, two nichicons and one KZG or something like that (1000uF, 820uF and 1800uF). Two were buling and the third one hidden under the green plastic was leaking too.
Now I had to get new capacitors. I've never been to any place in the US that sell caps before, but I heard that RadioShack sells them. I didn't take a soldering iron with me, so I bought one there for, I think, 22 dollars, that had to do.
I bought 2x 1000uF (Crossing fingers that they would work) because they didn't have 820uF ones, and one assorted pack with a lot of caps in it, where one 1800uF was in. The capacitors they sold seemed to be either old or just extremely big for their kind. I know I'm risking near death again soon because these aren't competition for Rubycons, Sanyos or so, but, I guess it'll do for now.
It was difficult to get the big caps in there, but with a bit of bending here and there, it eventually worked.
I booted it up and oops. No picture?! Yellow LED?! ---- Ooooops, forgot to plug in the 4-pin CPU power plug. Meh, let's pretend that didn't happen
- So it worked, and I hope that it won't die soon
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