Heya
Well I notice how shovenose and others talk about replacing caps and so so I decided to give it a try. I've always been scared to try such things being afraid I might mess up something and blow something up. So here's what happened.
I bought a dell Optiplex for cheap from a yard sale. Decided to fix it up for my 5 yr old son. So I replaced the cpu with a E6300 dual core and popped 3gb of ram in it with a Radeon X300 gpu for so long. But the thing kept on freezing. So I removed the ram tried different sticks another psu. I first thought it was the ram cause it kept on stucking when running mem test or when running mini xp on Hirens boot cd.
But then a mate told me Dell boards are known for they're bad caps and I should check it out. So I inspected the board and what do you know 4 bad caps. So I thought ok get another mobo. But hell the mobos cost more than what the whole pc wouldve cost.
So I wrote down the caps sizes which was 2200muF and went down to the electronics store. Cost me less than 3 dollars for the four of them. Borrowed a soldering iron and a solder sucker from a mate and nervously took the board out and started to go to work. Hell half an hour later I was done and the pc is working perfectly. I wish I took pictures of how I did it but being my first time trying it that was the last thing going through my mind.
I never knew it was so easy. Not much a guy can mess up seeing that the ends is at the bottom and nothing else close to it that you can accidentally hurt with the soldering iron. Never again will I replace a thing by buying something new because of a bad cap.
So yeah I lost my cap virginity
