Bad capacitors causing strange system behavior
This is, in fact something I’ve been getting ready to do an article on soon. I had a system that had very strange and random problems that I’ve visited and tried many of the typical fixes for, in fact I think I saw it a couple times a week and either couldn’t reproduce the errors on demand, or could only get an error once, do something and not see it again, then hear about something similar the next day…
Anyway, ultimately the system has been replaced (and it’s twin…) on inspecting the motherboard post-pull, there were some interesting issues with the capacitors, yellowish crusty leaked electrolyte… uh-huh, that explains everything…
The sunbeltblog has a story about a cnet articleon the very same problem that cnet describes as “plagueing” pcs.
In the News.com article is a GREAT illustration of a bulging capacitor (next to normal one’s…)
It certainly gives another possibility in the chain of “random crash” causes, it’s been around for a while, but sometime in the last two years I had heard companies claim that those problems were behind us…