722nd post: Fixing an old motherboard
Wondering what happened? Well, you wouldn't have noticed anything out of the ordinary if you have been following me on Twitter, but I need to take my mind off things from the stress of finding jobs. (Still not successful about it, if you are wondering.) This meant I stayed away from anything that required a lot of thinking. As of the time of writing this, I do not have any new content to publish.
Also, legitimised my Minecraft copy and hopped onto a multiplayer server, which meant a lot of time spent away on it like any new game I purchased with an interest in. How long have I played Minecraft? No idea, but looking at changelogs, I'm pretty certain it was before release v1.2 (released March 2012) where hoppers and redstone lamps weren't a thing.
So enough about that, and on to what I want to talk about.
I knew what the problem was, but I didn't know about the kinds of capacitors or soldering, so I thought about sending it to a repair shop. What held me back is my savings being so low that I deemed it as not important or urgent unless my parents were to help me. Financially at the very least. (As time told me, they didn't)
Then, something happened. Something as insignificant as wires inside a car cigarette socket to alligator clips, that I never used since ordering, fell off. No way I could put the wires back without soldering. Certainly not with cellophane tape either. When thinking of what else I could do with a soldering iron, I remembered the bad capacitors.
I looked up at how to solder and identifying bad capacitors after ordering a set. This is when I found out why it happened could be due to age as year printed on the board suggested it was made about 10 years ago. But it also falls within the range of time when there were a lot of bad capacitors going off, so I'm not sure which exactly.
Recently, just as replacement capacitors and soldering set arrives, I found out that there are even more bad capacitors with less obvious signs of failure on this board. Found more on another desktop PC that is still working, but showed unusually high amounts of heat generated for something that wasn't CPU intensive. Just as I thought I found them all, it turned out that there were ten more capacitors in a different form factor that could have failed.
More problems right after the other... Hope there are not more issues that I hadn't found yet.
Also, legitimised my Minecraft copy and hopped onto a multiplayer server, which meant a lot of time spent away on it like any new game I purchased with an interest in. How long have I played Minecraft? No idea, but looking at changelogs, I'm pretty certain it was before release v1.2 (released March 2012) where hoppers and redstone lamps weren't a thing.
So enough about that, and on to what I want to talk about.
Now that I'm in the mood to do some soldering, might as well replace these bad capacitors. Need to remove the whole motherboard. pic.twitter.com/MflbyZo8pt— Haruka ハルカハシ (@takhsiru) 2016年9月20日
In early August, one of the PCs failed to boot up. Shortly before it happened, it restarted randomly without warning, so that's a sign it's something to do with the hardware, which turned out to be the capacitors.These round metal things with purple markings are apparently capacitors too. They don't exactly look good. pic.twitter.com/KMSyXf61eh— Haruka ハルカハシ (@takhsiru) 2016年10月2日
I knew what the problem was, but I didn't know about the kinds of capacitors or soldering, so I thought about sending it to a repair shop. What held me back is my savings being so low that I deemed it as not important or urgent unless my parents were to help me. Financially at the very least. (As time told me, they didn't)
Then, something happened. Something as insignificant as wires inside a car cigarette socket to alligator clips, that I never used since ordering, fell off. No way I could put the wires back without soldering. Certainly not with cellophane tape either. When thinking of what else I could do with a soldering iron, I remembered the bad capacitors.
I looked up at how to solder and identifying bad capacitors after ordering a set. This is when I found out why it happened could be due to age as year printed on the board suggested it was made about 10 years ago. But it also falls within the range of time when there were a lot of bad capacitors going off, so I'm not sure which exactly.
Recently, just as replacement capacitors and soldering set arrives, I found out that there are even more bad capacitors with less obvious signs of failure on this board. Found more on another desktop PC that is still working, but showed unusually high amounts of heat generated for something that wasn't CPU intensive. Just as I thought I found them all, it turned out that there were ten more capacitors in a different form factor that could have failed.
More problems right after the other... Hope there are not more issues that I hadn't found yet.
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