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Serious question, does anyone else think recapping old motherboards is overkill for most people?
Three years ago I picked up a 1994 Packard Bell from a garage sale in Fresno for $15, and everyone online said the first thing I had to do was recap the whole board before even plugging it in. I put it off, just cleaned the dust and fired it up, and it has run fine for three years of light use, maybe 40 hours a year. Last month I finally opened it up to swap the CMOS battery and the caps looked perfectly flat with no bulging or leaking at all. I get that bad caps are real, I have seen a swollen one kill a monitor, but telling every new person to break out a soldering iron on day one feels like a good way to scare them off. What is your actual cutoff for recapping, does it depend on the brand of cap or the machine, or do you just wait for symptoms?
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wendy67414d ago
Doesn't it mostly come down to what the caps actually are? Some brands and bad years are a real gamble, but blanket telling everyone to recap a working board is how you get people to never touch a soldering iron at all.
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