She’s Gonna Blow!

While taking yet another closer look at the XP box’s motherboard, I noticed something which immediately made my heart sink: one of the capacitors, right near the ATX power connector, had a bulge in the top. Dammit. I remembered reading about that story years ago, and this board is from that era, but I thought I’d dodged the problem. Apparently some of those faulty capacitors are still out there and marching towards failure though, as reports continue to pop up occasionally.

I’m not really absolutely certain that it’s the same problem, especially since I’m only seeing one cap with a bulge and reports typically indicate multiple failures on the same board, but it’s possible that only a single bad capacitor slipped into the batch used to build this board, or there are others on this board that just haven’t failed yet. Or it could be faulty for reasons unrelated to that specific story.

In any case, a bulging capacitor that close to the main power source is certainly a warning sign and I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s causing problems. The board is long past warranty, and it would cost more than it’s worth to fix it up, so it looks like a replacement is the only real option. Nuts.