Quoting Johnathon Tinsley <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>: > > ----- "Farran Lee" wrote: >> not as far as I know - I'm only just getting to grips with the >> hardware side of computing. Is it obvious? Does the mb just not >> boot at all? >> >> > I've seen it once, when the capacators fail on a motherboard, its > pretty much useless. You can tell, by if they bulge at the top, and > sometimes leak some brown/orange residue (DON'T TOUCH!) > > Apparently, there was some industrial sabotage a few years back > (2000 ish I think) which affected a whole bunch of capacators used > on motherboards... though this is quite rare... > > Johnathon >
The Dell GX series suffer from the capacitor problem, and I think the motherboard is a dell proprietary one, so you basically have to buy a new machine. Most new boards don't use the older style liquid capacitors, so don't suffer from this problem. A dodgy PSU can kill a board, the voltage only needs to be a bit variable and it can break the whole lot. I have had a couple of boards go, but then I do have a lot of older stuff! Some motherboards are DOA, but this is rarer than it used to be. I have also killed a few from general clumsiness. A sure fire way of killing a motherboard is to think you have turned the laptop off, but forgetting that pressing the power button now brought up a dialouge asking what you wanted to do Then putting said laptop into its lovely warm padded case for the rest of the day, with its extended batteries in (It was a old dell with the two battery bays) with a reasonable amount of charge in both. Needless to say it was completely toasted, no power on at all. -- ubuntu-uk@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-uk https://wiki.ubuntu.org/UKTeam/
