Swapped a bad PSU capacitor for $0.50 instead of buying a new unit

Last week my desktop started random rebooting. Opened it up and spotted a bulging cap near the 12V rail. Desoldered it and put in a spare from an old motherboard I had in a box. Total cost was maybe 5 cents in solder and it's been stable for 6 days now. Anyone else keep a stash of salvaged parts for stuff like this?

2 comments

2 Comments

julia2869d ago

Ha, nice work. I had a similar thing happen with an old microwave once. The thing quit heating and I found a blown diode on the high voltage board. I scavenged one from a dead microwave I found on the curb. Fixed it for free and that thing ran another two years before the turntable motor gave out. It's kind of satisfying to keep junk electronics around just for the spare parts. I have a whole drawer full of random resistors, capacitors, and little connectors from old stuff. My wife calls it my "hoard box" but she was pretty happy when I fixed her hair dryer with a switch from an old PC power supply. Though I did learn the hard way that not all parts are worth saving. I spent an afternoon trying to desolder a weird shaped transformer from a broken stereo receiver. Got it free eventually but it was just a standard part you could buy for three bucks. Sometimes the time spent isn't worth the fifty cents saved.

richard_hall8d ago

The three buck part argument makes sense on paper, but I've been burned too many times by "standard" parts that turned out to have some weird pin spacing or obscure spec that made the cheap replacement useless. Your time isn't wasted if you actually learn something from the struggle, even if it was just "this transformer is a pain.