Hi all, For the past few weeks, my main production system (an Athlon XP 2600+ running on a nForce2 based motherboard with 512 megs of RAM) has been acting weird. It simply refused to boot up with the first attempt, and I had to turn the thing off and on several times before the system could come up. Also, coupled with this was random freezes, garbage on the screen, etc. Meanwhile, our LUG coordinator's system, which has similar specs (he has 1 GB of RAM and a different SMPS) refused to boot up, no matter what. After some head scratching we decided to run memtest86 on my box (which was, at least, booting up) - and I got around 700 errors in the first 5 minutes, and then the machine froze. Whooppeee-whoop - I thought, and opened up the box to inspect the RAM modules. The RAM looked OK. However, I noticed some brown crusty substance on one of the larger capacitors on the motherboard (beside the AGP slot). I did some googling, and found several articles about how capacitors made with a stolen formula for the electrolyte are leaking and causing motherboards to fail. Here's a pretty informative article on that: http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/WEBONLY/resource/feb03/ncap.html
IDG reports that around 6 capacitors have blown up in his machine, while Soumyadip (Modak), who has the same motherboard running a different processor and 256 MB of RAM also reports around 2-3 leaking capacitors. My question is - have any of you faced issues like this, and if so, what has been the solution. My board is still under warranty (valid till 1st Nov.), while both IDG and Soumyadip's board warranties have expired. -thanks- Sayamindu -- To unsubscribe, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the body "unsubscribe ilug-cal" and an empty subject line. FAQ: http://www.ilug-cal.org/node.php?id=3
