HFCS: effika’s blog

As some of you know, I’ve been having computer problems for the past month or so. I was getting a lot of random BSODs that always pointed to different files and errors. My PSU checked out fine, memtest86+ for a whole evening came back fine, and my hdd that I thought was flaking on me came up OK for now. I was about to check the voltages in the bios when I remembered I hadn’t cleaned my case out in a while, and thought perhaps I had a heat issue. I bought a fresh can of air tonight and proceeded to clean the case.

Well, my rig was pretty dusty. I even found a twig, a stow-away from my last move. Unfortunately, my newly-cleaned case won’t help matters much—I found a bunch of blown and leaky capacitors. Pictures forthcoming if I am not lazy, but in the meantime for those who have never seen them before I present a link to Google Image Search results.

I am not entirely surprised. My board is old and was manufactured during a time of poor capacitor quality. Here’s an article about the capacitor fiasco from Geek.com, one of my favorite sites when I was in jr. high. I’m actually a bit surprised to see them still up.

So what will I do? I know how to handle a soldering gun, so I could conceivably replace them myself. On the other hand, I’ve been itching for a new build for over a year, and this might just be my excuse to do it sooner than later. It’s a crapshoot as to how long this rig will keep working.