Capacitor plague – Wikipedia | Hacker News Reader

Capacitor plague – Wikipedia

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65 pointsdeegles36 comments

Audio equipment got hit by this too. I scored a very nice surround receiver and speaker set this way; someone had put it on the curb, so I took it home for examination, and $20 in replacement caps later it was good to go. Lasted me years, until an evil-minded cat threw up in it.

Quite normal on a night shift to replace hundreds of surface mount capacitors from a calrec sound desk. Well normal for my colleagues - my soldering is terrible, I spent the time writing perl instead.

This is also an issue on the original Xbox game console. It is especially exacerbated on a specific capacitor on the motherboard which is asked to perform above it's specifications.

It is known to "pop" and splash acid all over the motherboard and ruining the motherboard in the process.

Luckily it's only function is to keep time (for about 8 hours after unplugging, then it dies and forgets the time anyway). The fix is very quick, wiggle the capacitor until the legs break and remove it. I've done it for about 8 boxes. This procedure is very, very common among collectors and enthusiasts as the capacitor is not needed for normal operation and it's usually not a matter of if the capacitor will blow, but when, leaving you with a brick.

If you have an original Xbox console and would like to know more, search for "Xbox clock capacitor removal", or message me.

(Common symptoms besides not turning on can also be: Not turning off. Turning on or off randomly. Randomly ejecting the DVD tray. Always ejecting the DVD tray and never allowing it to be closed. Never ejecting the DVD tray. Some or all controller ports no longer functioning.

If your Xbox doesn't have these symptoms but it is forgetting the time after turning it off, you should open your box as soon as possible and investigate the capacitor.)

When I was in High School our school district had a ton of computers by state grant (1 for every 2 students). One summer (2005 if I remember correctly) the IBM desktops all started popping capacitors. Me and a few technically inclined friends got a nice summer job out of identifying affected machines, gathering them up, re-imaging them, and replacing them around the district.

Funny to learn this was such a widespread issue

I worked tech support for my small public school district when I was a senior in high school in 2004-5. I must have replaced at least a hundred motherboards with this issue. Apparently they were covered under warranty (mostly HP computers, I believe), but I wonder if there was any conpensation for labor. Those things are tedious to replace in the slightly odd form factors they use for education/enterprise workstations. Not that my labor was costing the district too much ($6.50 an hour, which I considered a very generous premium above minimum wage.)

Whenever I have friends give me electronics stead throwing them away, without actual data, id say 95% of the time it's a capacitor

I really wish manufacturing encouraged easy swap components stead filling landfills

Almost every one of my Samsung Monitors I bought between 2000 and 2007 has experienced this problem. I went thru and replaced them and now my 17 year old 19 inch monitors work like a charm.

I will never get this lucky charm obsession with miniature online success stories.

I used to <behaviour Y> and experience <problem Y>. But then I <solution X>. Now I <happy-life X>.

There's a bot/AI application in there somewhere. Of course, this is one of those "we spent so long thinking about whether we could, we didn't stop to ask whether we should" type projects...

There's probably money to be made there. Could use something similar to generate realistic fake reviews.

This ended up having a lasting legacy as many motherboard manufactures switched to Japanese made and/or polymer capacitors. They would tout this fact in their marketing material as a sign of quality. Tech sites started noting the source of a board's caps in their reviews. To this day you will sometimes see "all solid capacitors" in the marketing literature for a motherboard.

It is slightly questionable whether this episode is really the cause for the switch. Around the same time frame significantly faster switching transistors became available which allowed DC-DC converters to reach higher efficiency by increasing switching frequency, which has the nice side effect of requiring smaller filtering capacitors at the expense of requiring lower ESL/ESR.

Also over past 5 years or so small chip low-voltage MLCCs became available in previously unheard of capacities that are perfectly usable for many bulk filtering applications with prices that are competitive with aluminium electrolytics.

I don't know why, but bad electrolytic capacitors also sometimes have a fishy smell.

IANAC but my research suggests the odour is due to the presence of amine salts of boric acid in the electrolyte. Any chemists on hand to confirm or correct this?

I remember a guy figuring out a fix for a specific motherboard. That type of motherboard suffered especially from these problems. The guy got a few hunderd of these, fixed around 95% of them and resold them.

A similar phenomenon is that of swollen lithium ion batteries: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=swollen+battery

A victim here. My 2007 MacBook Pro started to swell on the bottom after a couple of years, didn't think much of it, it was a tiny bump at first, but then it almost doubled in thickness so I replaced it with a cheap Chinese knockoff (was broke at the time due to starting a startup), and the same thing happened in about a year. Lesson learned.

same in 2009 model, i'm using it right now, (without OS X of course). there is now a 4-2mm lip on the underside where the battery panel is being pushed out. I still get about 40mins and seems to have stopped swelling so what the heck :P Anyway these days Apple sells those sort of things as "features"... lets call it a "leg gripping lip" allows lap usage at strange angles.

As a community services announcement: you should probably replace that battery immediately.

It might never burn your house down while you sleep, but someone else might read your comment and think it's okay.

I most certainly will not.

Shorting, puncture and overcharge cause lipo fires. Expansion can lead to puncture and shorting in stupid thin enclosures, this is in an inch thick unsealed enclosure with lots of give which even pops off with little force, containing a battery which has swollen around 1-2% of it's original volume.

This is not a consumer advice forum, it's hacker news...

Hey, you probably know that but just in case: charging a swollen battery is a fire hazard.

It's ok, it swollen to it's current size 8 years ago... and hasn't changed since. It's also not restricted to it's housing because the battery compartment quite easily pops off.

(non-extreme) swelling does not itself cause fire, restriction which leads to puncture or shorting does... this is not a year old 1mm thick smart phone, it's an inch thick decade old macbook.

Does this phenomenon have an identified timespan like the capacitor plague? Is it over now?

When Android was a new thing, the swollen battery was one of the many things wrong with my G1 phone. Haven't encountered it on any device since then, fortunately.

>Does this phenomenon have an identified timespan like the capacitor plague? Is it over now?

As Samsung recently demonstrated, lithium batteries are far from a solved problem. There are already reports of iPhone 8s disintegrating due to puffed batteries.

We still don't fully understand the chemistry of lithium batteries, but the market keeps demanding higher energy density. There are bound to be blunders along the way.

https://wccftech.com/iphone-8-swollen-batteries/

This happened to me on a very popular brand of motherboard at the time. Now I like it when I see Nichicon capacitors on the product description.

I remember getting replacement capacitors for a motherboard I bought during that time, fortunately I never had to use them.

I have nothing to add outside of some nostalgia: I once had a dual Celeron rig that fell to this problem. It started with not turning on after hitting the power button. Sometimes it took two to twenty times. I remember when it finally died, after bartending a Phish concert near Milwaukee.

I remember a bunch of MSI motherboards I had slowly dying over a couple of years because of this.

I remember soldering in new caps into a PIII Abit Mainboard that stopped working.

Good times... (haha maybe not)

But the issue was known to interested parties and generally publicised.

I thought caps are generally the first thing you look at for any failing/failed electronics? Least I tend to, its pretty easy to spot bulges in electrolytic caps and pop em off then have things magically work again.

I had to replace the caps in my SyncMaster 204B. The problem was so pervasive that I ordered a kit for my monitor online that had all the caps I needed for this particular monitor.

I had a GeForce card at the time that died from the bad capacitor problems. I also remember many iMac’s with failed capacitors.

I had _three_ of the same generation card die on me. The past and future generations still work fine.

(7xxx/8xxx/9xxx series if I recall correctly.)

No problems with 560, 1060, or even really old cards like the MX series. So "specific generation of capacitors" seems to line up with it pretty well. I find it hard to believe that just that one chipset generation was terrible (as opposed to OEM's using popular but faulty brand caps and getting burned by it).

Huh, I guess this might explain why several capacitors on my video card failed around 2007.

After reading this, the Dell Optiplex 745 comes to mind.

I might not be the only person who remembers this time fondly for the profits it gave me.

During this time I was doing a lot of computer repair for family friends and other acquaintances that I volunteered with. Most of this work was unpaid for various reasons (either "Family Obligation(tm)" or me helping out some folks who didn't have enough money to pay for repair services). I often received a "Thank You" for the free service of the "it's broken, but have it -- maybe you can fix it" kind of variety[0]. Often, I'd explain that I couldn't do much with these things and would politely refuse, but on occasion, I'd run into an item that I knew I could sell broken on e-bay and recoup some cost, or I'd encounter someone who was embarrassed at not being able to afford to pay and would accept the item as a suitable gift to cover their pride.

Around 2006, I was given an exceptionally expensive plasma television from one of these individuals and really wanted to fix it up, so I took it apart and discovered that it was simply a case of some bulging capacitors. I have plenty of experience with a soldering iron but these weren't even difficult soldering jobs - they were large caps that were obviously part of the power supply component and having a box of these in the basement, I replaced them and ended up with a nice television that used until a couple of years ago.

While initially researching this model of television, I ran across complaints about failing capacitors which led me to some articles complaining about Dell motherboards having similar problems and a lot of noise about this being an industry epidemic, so I investigated the five or so PCs is my basement and seven LCD monitors. In the case of the displays, every one of them had bad caps on the PSU. In the case of the Dell PCs, it was motherboards. I fixed each and sold them for a few hundred a piece. I ended up buying a lot of broken stock on eBay based on descriptions of why they were broken and picked up a nice AVR, amp and sub-woofer that way saving at least 50% (I picked up the $300 amp for $10, my best purchase).

I had several of my own equipment die from this, including a SageTV media streaming device, almost all of the first generation of which had 6-7 bad caps. The lot of these sorts of problems started drying up around 2011/2012 for me, but I still encounter hardware that I suspect is a few bum caps away from perfectly functional. I even had my secondary sub, purchased in 1996, fail due to this.

[0] This happened more often than it didn't and was usually monitors. I recovered data from a bum hard drive for an old lady who had 4 different LCD monitors ranging from 1024x760-1280x1080 in her basement, all capable of only lighting the little LED in the front. It made no sense for her to have even one of these, let alone five. Sometimes it was the old PC that was a year old but failed and a replacement was gifted from the son-in-law for Christmas.

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