Troubleshooting capacitors...

A nick and the eventual failure of a cap were probably unrelated unless you really did cause a pinhole and the electrolyte dried out prematurely.

More than likely you will see an increase in case temperature on a failing cap. If the ESR is rising then the same amount of ripple as normal would cause more heating and may allow enough noise into the CPU to loose data during some clock cycles.

If your motherboard has overclocking capability, try lowering the clock and raising the VDDi/o and VDD core voltages. This will give better noise immunity on the busses, reducing the clock compensates for the greater heat due to higher VDD. Still need a good heatsink.

Go ahead and replace the caps but there are still lots of other hardware resources built into the motherboard that you cannot isolate that can fail. Some you can disable in BIOS.

I am fighting a similar random BSOD crash with BAD POOL CALLER as the typical result.

Try collecting some minidump files and use windebug to read them. It may point you toward a particular driver which in turn leads to the hardware fault.

Hi,

Thanks for all the great information! I saved everything you wrote to a txt file. Yeah, BAD_POOL_CALLER was also one of the errors I was seeing as well. Actually, I think I probably saw every single stop error at least once. LOL.

Well, this is strange... Everything is working again with both CPU's. I'm wondering if that cap is loose and has a "sweet spot" that it needs to be nudged in. Hard to tell. I am just wondering who had the bright idea of wedging these caps inbetween the main power connector and the CPU slot. It is a very tight fit.

I'm going to run SETI on both CPU's overnight and see how it looks in the morning. Maybe it just needed some lovin'. Since it runs headless, it may have just gotten lonely. :-)

Thanks again. If it crashes overnight, I'll use what you wrote as a guide..

"Eric" wrote in news:48067dd2$0$4101$ snipped-for-privacy@roadrunner.com:

I had a problem like that with this several yr old 900Mhz PC I'm using,and it turned out that the microprocessor fan was loading a supply. (after replacing several slightly bulging electrolytics,and a new power supply)

An ESR meter -may- find a bad electrolytic,but there might be other electrolytics in parallel with a bad cap,giving a 'normal' low ESR.

--
Jim Yanik
jyanik
at
kua.net

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I am not familiar with "dinked", can you be a bit more specific in more common English usage.

I am not familiar with "dinked", can you be a bit more specific in more common English usage.

seconded

I've never heard the word, but context says nicked, dented, dinged, damaged...

In the UK dinky means small , probably from the toy car manufacturer called Dinky, so dinked may have meant squashed , to get access or similar

-- Diverse Devices, Southampton, England electronic hints and repair briefs , schematics/manuals list on

I've heard it in US useage to refer to those little knocks and dents that appear on your car, from supermarket trollies and people carelessly opening their doors into yours and so on, so I took the OP to be referring to 'a small dent'. I'd have thought it was one of those words that I can't remember the name of, and certainly couldn't spell, that conveys an idea of a sound ...

Arfa

No. Just replace it.

Concur....

jak

Hmm. Thats interesting. I'll keep that in mind in the future...

Hi,

Yeah, I think that is what I will do. Even though I got it stable again, I couldn't resist the temptation to continue to troubleshoot. There are six caps, all the same size, right next to the Slot-1 CPU. When I tap the "bad" cap, Windows gives a stop error about half the time. Tapping the other five doesn't produce anything.

I came up with a plan of attack on how to de-solder the cap. Instead of removing the motherboard, which would be a major PITA since there is so much hardware in the case, I'm going to get at it from the backside by dremeling out a square on the back chassis that is just large enough to get at the cap. Instead of it being an all day affair, I think it should only take an hour. Afterwards, I'll blow it clean and make sure that there are no metal shreddings still in the case..

Take it apart and fix it right. If that one cap is bad, the rest likely are too. I doubt your little scuff is the cause.

Be advised that one side of those caps is going to go to a vast groundplane internal board layer, which sinks heat away faster than you can believe. In my experience, electrolytics are very hard to get out of computer boards. Adds a whole new meaning to the term 'mother' board ... :-) You will need either a good professional desoldering station, or a very hot iron, and top quality solder wick.

Arfa

"Well, son, I know just what you're thinking. 'Did he Dremel out six milligram of shavings, or just five?' Truth to tell, in all the excitement I kinda lost count myself. So, considering that this is a 44-millimeter Dremel, one of the most powerful metal-shredders in the world, you have to ask yourself... do I feel lucky?" -- "Dirty Harry" O'Toolihan

My advice, friend: take out the >mumblefrotz< motherboard, put it on a properly-grounded static-control mat, wear a proper static- dissipation wrist strap, and do the job properly.

I've learned the hard way that shortcuts are often very expensive in the end.

--
Dave Platt                                    AE6EO
Friends of Jade Warrior home page:  http://www.radagast.org/jade-warrior
  I do _not_ wish to receive unsolicited commercial email, and I will
     boycott any company which has the gall to send me such ads!

Just think about the magnetic energy from that electric Dremel wonder tool will do to your computery.It might might not show up at first, but it WILL later on down the line in your computery.I own, and use a very nice Velocity Micro ProMagix big desk top computer

I bought for $1,440.00 less than five years ago.But, I never drag my computer around in the mud. cuhulin

using,and

just an idea - any comments ?

Could an errant one show up as wavering temperature, not necessarily obviously hot ?

Say 8 x 1N4148 picked to match reasonably for forward V for ambient temp plus value at ambient plus 5 degree C Absolute agreement not required here as it would be monitoring changes so perhaps no need for presets per diode. Feed each diode (electrically isolated and thermally connected ,placed atop each of 8 active caps), in turn, twice a second, from a stable reference V, via a couple of sequenced 4016 "switches" and monitoring the forward drop on a DVM. NTC , but should be readable to effectively 0.1 deg C resolution

-- Diverse Devices, Southampton, England electronic hints and repair briefs , schematics/manuals list on

Hmmmmm ok idea but I don't know about the Dremel. Back in the early 2000's I was responsible for several industrial servers that needed regular cleaning. These were all NT4 or W2K and Novell servers with RAID5 hot swap hardware and tons of other junk inside. I know it can be inundating but you're safer to remove the main board. Just my .02 worth.

That's another issue and thanks for reminding me. I replaced several caps in the power supply section of an Abit main board notorious for bad caps. Those were a real PITA to get out and I had to use a 140 watt Weller gun.