[colug-432] Equinox Computer Checking

[Ethan Dicks]

On Wed, Mar 29, 2017 at 9:18 AM,  <jep200404 at columbus.rr.com> wrote:
> Bulged caps
>
> This is much less of a problem than it used to be.

It is and it isn't.  There are 2 causes for this.  One is the
much-discussed "Chinese Capacitor Disease".   A large number of those
boards are already toast.  The other capacitor plague is in 1990s
hardware from when designs were switching from through-hole caps to
SMT caps and they hadn't figured out new soldering temperature
profiles and they "cooked" the SMT caps.  The caps may or may not
bulge but they do leak.  Visibly.  Corrosively.

There's a fever business in restoring old Amigas and Macintoshes from
that era right now.  My own Amiga 4000 had leaky caps on the CPU board
(along with NiCd battery damage on the mainboard - humorously referred
to as "Varta - destroyer of boards!"  (I'm still fixing the NiCd
damage).

This is not likely to be an issue for PCs unless you are still running
pre-Pentium or early Pentium boxes.  In the Vintage Computing world,
it _is_ a big deal and there's much scrambling over it.

-ethan