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I will pledge never to give them another dime.

Enjoy your piece of shit Samesung equipment.

No. Bulging capacitors were either the direct result of components that used shoddy electrolyte formulas in their creation, or quality components that were under specced for the job they're tasked to do.

In other word, I have yet to find the switch to RHOS being directly responsible for bulging capacitors.

Samsung uses poor quality Chinese capacitors (yeah, I know, that's an tautology) that are practically designed to fail just outside the warranty period (e.g. the notorious CapXon). This is a scandalous waste, and Samsung is doing it deliberately since better parts are available.

When they overheat, bulge and ooze, causing well known failure modes, you can easily replace them with higher quality parts - this site has the details.

I'm in the process of repairing two Samsung 225bw screens that were thrown at out work with this fault (4.5 years since manufacture). The parts only cost a few bucks and the soldering isn't too difficult. Getting the case open is probably the hardest part.

And a nice forum for getting help is the badcaps forums. It's an eye-opener how often a device failure is due to degraded capacitors.

I just replaced the capacitors in one of my computers that had bad capacitors they where branded KZG.The computer works fine now it had been freezing 4 or 5 times a day. Found kits on http://www.badcaps.net/store/index.php?cPath=3 . I have used digikey in the past, but there interface blows, took me about minute to order all what I needed from badcaps.

http://www.badcaps.net/forum/index.php

It was more than just Dell having capacitor issues left and right.

But most vendors didn't hide it to the extent that Dell did.

Every company makes lemons from time to time; the better ones are those that admit it.

http://www.badcaps.net/forum/index.php

It was more than just Dell having capacitor issues left and right.

I wouldn't say the time of bad capacitors is over. I've still run into and heard about recent cases.

I think more people should know about the whole story and you can read it at http://www.badcaps.net

Not as packaged as iFixit sounds, but I've found the Badcaps Forums a great place to learn about LCD monitor repair and electronics operation.

Um, ones that aren't made with bad capacitors. In case you didn't know, this normally shouldn't be happening. That you think it is normal indicates how bad the problem has become. Read the history of the problem on the link provided.

I don't disagree with you that MS skimped on the h/w quality. I was shocked when mine red ringed. Really, the unit should have a thermal sensor on sensitive parts so that it doesn't allow itself to overheat to the point of self-destruction. God, all CPUs in the last 5 years (or more) have had this feature, why not mobos and video cards?

You may have had some other problem besides overheating, perhaps an over-voltage? The power brick should smooth that out, but what if its power-smoothing abilities failed? It could have been bad caps too, which can die at any time.

Anyway, I agree 100% that MS did the right thing by extending the default warranty. My respect for them went up a bit...from around -100 to maybe -98.

No personal experience with Abit. To your statement, all the motherboard manufacturers have been affected by bad capacitors. See http://www.badcaps.net/. In the bad caps dot net forums, you can read about the details of the class action lawsuit against Abit.

Heck, Wiki calls it a "plague" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capacitor_plague.

However, silicon is silicon, capacitors are still made from the same things

Thank you for playing the game, but you have lost. Rather then using more expensive Nippon electronics, the Chinese parts you used had a few part per million more impurities. This lead to early thermal failure of your mainboard.

If you would like to play the game again, please acquire more venture capital and buy quality next time. You may still lose the game to your manufacture buying counterfeit parts, using the wrong specification solder, or unforeseen interactions from running at many gigahertz at high temperature.

This show has been hosted by an automation robot that costs 75 times what your laptop does and still has occasional electronics failures. :)

My VP-6 w/ 2x 1Ghz PIII is still my main home PC. My board fortunately seems to have dodged the stolen-formula Taiwanese capacitor problem that plagued Abit and others around 1999/2000 and led to a class action suit and settlement.

I am completely under-whelmed by 80+ ATX power supplies and I'd like to find a power supply which reached better than 90%.

On the other hand, even an 80+ supply is far better than older ones. Last year, an old Antec 300W supply died in my file server after a capacitor went *pop* (the classic bad capacitor syndrome), and I replaced it with an OCZ 700W unit (overkill, I know, but it had lots of SATA power connectors, and eliminated a rat's nest of adapters and Y-cables). I was flabbergasted to see that the load on the UPS dropped by 50%.

badcaps.net I've repaired about 20 motherboards with blown capacitors since reading that site. I cannot tell you how much money and time that has saved me. It's a hell of a lot easier (for me at least) to spend 20 minutes replacing 5 to 15 bad caps, then to put a new board in and trying to get windows working and praying that you don't have to reactivate the product over the phone.

http://www.badcaps.net/forum/ has a lot of information.

badcaps.net I've repaired about 20 motherboards with blown capacitors since reading that site. I cannot tell you how much money and time that has saved me. It's a hell of a lot easier (for me at least) to spend 20 minutes replacing 5 to 15 bad caps, then to put a new board in and trying to get windows working and praying that you don't have to reactivate the product over the phone.

http://www.badcaps.net/forum/ has a lot of information.

> They're all just as "similary equipped".

Windows Vista is unusable, a day with that turkey should convince anyone that OSX alone is worth paying the extra for a mac. Alternatively grab your emachines POS, then sit for 18 months wondering what kind of asshole company makes a laptop without a firewire port. Then when you do pull something in, ask where the 'similary' creative suite is. Then 2 years in, just after the warranty expires your laptop peecee starts locking up and crashing randomly because the cheap shit caps used at manufacture were no fucking good.

Go ahead bargin hunter, make my day.

Last week, I heard a muffled "pop" coming from my server, followed by it powering off. Sure enough, after six years, the PSU had finally succumbed to Bad Capacitor Syndrome. I picked a new PSU that had active power factor correction and a high-efficiency design - and found that my UPS was reporting about 40% less load, in spite of the only change being the power supply.

Switching from a CRT monitor to an LCD made another big difference. It's surprising how much of a power hog a CRT can be. The 22" widescreen I have now uses less than half the power of my old 17" CRT!

Bad ones tend to either go *BANG* or bulge and possibly ooze their electrolyte out the vents in their tops, which looks like a crusty brown/black mess, almost like someone caked mud on your board. Tends to make the board extremely unstable (my friend's used to boot only after 3 or 4 attempts to power on) if they work at all.

See here for more info/pics/replacements + instructions: http://www.badcaps.net/

Tm

how does one know if the caps are bad?

For the full story see www.badcaps.net

Bad capacitors got everybody, not just Dell. While Dell and other large computer vendors do sell some of the worst components and suffer some of the highest breakdown rates, the capacitor problem got everyone a few years back and still do. badcaps.net has the dirty details and the issue has been covered by Slashdot numerous times:

• 2005
• 2005
• 2002

Solid sounds good to me.

Sure recall the laptop batteries, but they do nothing for GX270 & 280 owners that have machines stuffed with a failing batch of Nichicon capacitors produced in 2003... The Nichicons produced before and after that batch are perfectly fine, just that one batch from is bad.

http://www.badcaps.net/forum/attachment.php?attach mentid=1553&stc=1

http://www.badcaps.net/forum/attachment.php?attach mentid=431

Dell is doing something about the problem, but for the most part, a lot of people are not even aware of the problem...

http://news.com.com/Bulging+capacit...742.html?tag =nl

http://news.com.com/Dells+third-qua...630.html?tag =nl

http://news.com.com/Dells+dilemma--...26477&subj=n ews

Sure recall the laptop batteries, but they do nothing for GX270 & 280 owners that have machines stuffed with a failing batch of Nichicon capacitors produced in 2003... The Nichicons produced before and after that batch are perfectly fine, just that one batch from is bad.

http://www.badcaps.net/forum/attachment.php?attach mentid=1553&stc=1

http://www.badcaps.net/forum/attachment.php?attach mentid=431

Dell is doing something about the problem, but for the most part, a lot of people are not even aware of the problem...

http://news.com.com/Bulging+capacit...742.html?tag =nl

http://news.com.com/Dells+third-qua...630.html?tag =nl

http://news.com.com/Dells+dilemma--...26477&subj=n ews

Check out badcaps.net:

http://www.badcaps.net/forum/

That isn't completely true. I build my owns systems not only so I can get the components I want but also to get the longer warranty's that are usually associated with 'premium' components. All the major components in my systems have 3 year or lifetime warranty's.

In 2004 I experienced this 2 years 11 months into the 3 year warranty on a Gigabyte motherboard.