From: "Dustin Cook" <
[email protected]>
| This is probably going to sound odd to you.. but, humour me.
| Your computer is old enough that it could be using bad capacitors,
| which have a defect and die prematurely by swelling. If you could
| open the case and check the caps, they are round objects, look like
| canisters, with flat tops. What your looking for is a rounded top
| and/or outright burst top with a brown/grey material sitting on it.
| Please let me know what you find.
LOL
I haven't heard about the Taiwanese capacitors in quite a while. If I
remember, the formula for electrlytic capacitors was stolen through
industrial espionage but it was the wrong formula and the capacitors
failed in droves.
Just finished recovering a RAID 0 powered XP Pro machine being used as a
simple file server. Had a Soyo Dragon mainboard with a row of bad caps. I
was called in to determine why the machine would not boot. It was around
5 years old. Two 80gig hard drives, both in smart warning condition, bad
mainboard, and less than 10gigs of data stored on it, none of which was
backed up someplace safe. To add insult to injury, the information was
varied from confidential records (the owner is an attorney here), to his
personal financial records. And this seems to be quiet common around
here. Many small companies do not have reasonably decent backups, or in
some cases, none whatsoever.
Two days prior, I was called to check on a machine that started
displaying "wierd characters on the screen, some blinking, some not."
Turned out to be bad capacitors on the mainboard near the memory slots,
that was an HP computer with an Asus mainboard.
The subway store just down from my house almost lost 5 years worth of
sales data due to a failing hard disk, and no IT person. It's been a
miserable week for failing equipment.
Fixmbr should have done it for you in