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Saw a blue screen at a client's office in Dallas last week that made me rethink my whole troubleshooting process
Turned out it was a bad capacitor on the motherboard, something I haven't dealt with since the early 2000s. Any old school techs here still keep a soldering iron handy for that kind of thing?
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nora11025d ago
Man, bad caps bring back memories. I still have my old Weller soldering station in the garage, haven't used it in years but I can't bring myself to toss it. Had a similar thing happen with an old Dell Optiplex a couple years back, bulging caps right near the CPU. Nobody even thinks to look for that stuff anymore, we all go straight to swapping drives or ram first. Glad you caught it, always satisfying to fix something that old school.
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barbarah1925d ago
Oh man, "bulging caps near the CPU" ... that's exactly what mine looked like, like little tiny soda cans about to pop. @nora110 I gotta admit, I've got the same problem with holding onto old tools. My soldering iron is covered in dust but I swear it'll come back in style someday... even if I'm the only one who cares about it. It is satisfying though, you're right about that.
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the_viola25d ago
Right, because swapping the RAM is always everyone's first move, even when the damn thing smells like burnt marshmallows. Saves time, I guess, if you enjoy swapping parts for no reason. That old Weller will probably outlast all of us, mine's got more lives than a cat. Fixing stuff with actual solder and not just swapping boards feels like a lost art now, but it's pretty satisfying when it actually works.
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