Hey people, you might remember that a while agao I was given a computer that kept restarting no matter what I tried. Recently I pulled out that motherboard again because I was given a 128Mb 9250 and I wanted to test it out, so I grabbed some spare parts and put together a system and of course I get reboots. But I noticed something this time: a puffed out leaky capacitor near the CPU. Could this be the problem? its a normal 1000uF capacitor so it should be fine to replace. Is it fine to just solder a new capacitor to it? Or am I going to run into problems with other things melting off? Thanks Mattwizz3 : ) Sempron 2600+ @ 2.2GHz 1Gb DDR400 Asus A7N8X-E Deluxe 200GB SATA 2X 80Gb IDE 256Mb MSI 6800 Ultra

If you're reasonably good at soldering I'd go ahead and replace it. Remove the board and use something like desoldering braid to remove the old solder and capacitor. Then solder in the new one. It's probably electrolytic so make sure you get the polarity right.

Badcaps forums - they have some helpful FAQs etc. If I know the answer I'll tell you the answer, and if I don't, I'll just respond, cleverly --Donald Rumsfeld

Ok, thanks guys. I went and baught the capacitor and have now solderd it in. Thanks for your help. I've got it to boot to 98SE, and doing a Prime 95 test on it. How long should I test it for and are there any other tests I can run on this to check stability? Its been running prime for 10 mins now which is a record, probably the longest its run without a reboot. Mattwizz3 : ) Sempron 2600+ @ 2.2GHz 1Gb DDR400 Asus A7N8X-E Deluxe 200GB SATA 2X 80Gb IDE 256Mb MSI 6800 Ultra

overnight Matt...treat is like memtest. Skip

If one cap was leaking then chances are more of at least the same size will also go. I would keep an eye on this. I had severe data corruption on a machine with bad capacitors. I didn't know about the issue with bad electrolyte in MANY caps until the computer would no longer boot. By that time there were three bad ones. FYI there was at least one MBoard recall (Abit) because of this issue. It was an industry wide problem at the time. Bad, incomplete, stolen electrolyte formula was the cause.

Wiki has a decent treatment of the subject - caps can fail for reasons unrelated to the industrial espionage 'incident' - the symptoms of failure are quite variable, but a bad capacitor is unmistakable If I know the answer I'll tell you the answer, and if I don't, I'll just respond, cleverly --Donald Rumsfeld