Re: Can a motherboard virgin (me!) replace my bad caps?



This tube thing: I read about it in your How To notes. A close-up pic would be nice! The tube must surely be mighty small to sit in the mobo, which is very thin. This seems to me like the biggest potential cause of failure.

I agree that I have nothing to lose! The mobo's broken, so I can't make it any worse. However, it looks like sourcing the right caps in the UK is going to be a problem. If I do get the caps and the repair is successful, it will be a pretty cheap repair! These caps are dirt...

Re: Can a motherboard virgin (me!) replace my bad caps?



Sorry, I meant that if I chose to fit a replacement board, this would be a brand new recent make/brand, using e.g. an AMD Sempron. There's no way I'd just buy the *same* board!...

Re: Can a motherboard virgin (me!) replace my bad caps?



There are four large caps and two smaller ones (all about 30mm high, 12mm dia).

The large ones are all 4700uF 6.3V
The smalls are 3900uF 10V

I've found the large ones at Farnell UK (Panasonic EEUFM0J472L).
But for the small ones Farnell only do 3900 6.3V, not 10V

Is it imperative that these exactly match the ones I'm replacing?...

Re: Can a motherboard virgin (me!) replace my bad caps?



I have not used lead-free solder yet. Is this old m/b likely to use lead-free?

Are these caps easy to get hold of? (As in: purchase)...

Re: Can a motherboard virgin (me!) replace my bad caps?



I don't understand. Why should a replacement board fail?...

I have a faulty MS-6340 mainboard in a five/six-year-old noname PC bought from Staples (UK) in around 2000. The PC started showing weird symptoms only a couple of years after I bought it, but at the time I had other stuff to deal with so I just stuck it in a cupboard and used another PC. Now I've dug the Staples/6340 out again, cleaned dust off the m/b (bristle brush/Hoover) and got it going. But the erratic working is soon evident (BSODs, fatal exception errors, freeze-ups, sudden reboots). I got it working for long enough to wipe the hard disk and reinstall 98SE from scratch. I also used System...