I lost a MB to bad capacitors, and the machine will not turn on without the caps. His machine turns on, so I don't think that's what we have here.
Also, the caps make a strong ozone smell when they fail. I thought my house was on fire. It's very noticable.
When I looked at the MB, the caps all had what looked like chalk coming out the top.
Also, the capacitor problem goes back a couple of years, so if he has a MB with bad caps, it would have already failed.
I lost a MB to bad capacitors, and the machine will not turn on without the caps. His machine turns on, so I don't think that's what we have here.
Also, the caps make a strong ozone smell when they fail. I thought my house was on fire. It's very noticable.
When I looked at the MB, the caps all had what looked like chalk coming out the top.
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I know that happens with some older motherboards, but I've never seen it. But I've seen lots of power supplies ruined by bad capacitors. The trashed power supply then (sometimes) takes out hard drives, motherboards, DVD drives. Memory and CPU was left intact
Also, the caps make a strong ozone smell when they fail. I thought my house was on fire. It's very noticable.
Not all capacitors fail in the same way or at the same rate. Most of our Dell machines failed slowly, exhibiting intermittent problems for a week or two before finally failing altogether.
Also, the capacitor problem goes back a couple of years, so if he has a MB with bad caps, it would have already failed.
I'm currently waiting for a replacement motherboard from Dell for a machine that just failed this week. Again, everyone's experience will vary.