6 ms·

Dell Tried to Hide Bad Capacitors Problem 2003-2005 (2010)

149 points by jdkee 4y ago

cypherg 4y ago
I worked for a third-party company covering dell business tech support at the time and we would blanket approve 100s if not 1000s of processor + motherboard replacements (more efficient to just replace both at once) daily dude to bad caps. RIP GX270.
dillutedfixer 4y ago
Oh man, this brings back memories! I worked helpdesk for a mid-sized company in SF these years. Things got so bad with our Dell machines that I would call my local Dell repair tech and he would answer the phone with "Ok how many bulging capacitors this time?". We probably replaced at least 100 motherboards for bad caps in such a short time. Reflecting on that, the amount of e-waste generated from this must have been staggering. Jerry - if you're reading this, you probably single-handedly kept that place running ;)
- ethbr0 4y ago
  I remember desoldering and replacing caps on my dad's Dell OptiPlex board. Was a good pitch for the value of a computer-related major instead of medicine.
- stefan_ 4y ago
  That's funny because these days we call Dell all the time for bulging lithium ion batteries in their laptops. I think they don't understand the concept of not charging them to 110%.
  - Spooky23 4y ago
    Yeah the Dell bulge rate is like 10x HP. The other fun one is their docks, which had a NIC bug tthat would brick the dock.
NegativeLatency 4y ago
I have one of these that I’m going to be recapping soon actually
sparrish 4y ago
It wasn't just Dell, every manufacturer had bad caps in those years. MSI, ASUS, you name it. They all bought those cheap knock-off capacitors for their boards. They lasted about 6000 hours - we could set it in a calendar and did so many RMAs. For the local 911 center, we'd replace the boards every 4 months, before the caps failed, because they just couldn't tolerate the downtime.
- metadat 4y ago
  What was the fate of the old, not-yet-dead motherboards?
  - savoytruffle 4y ago
    They were dead. Recycled or landfilled. Hopefully the former. The goop leaks out and ruins the board anyway.
    - metadat 4y ago
      I was trying to ask about the fate of the discarded but still working hardware. 4 months is 2920 hours, which is less than the stated 6000 hours to failure. Though only by 2x.
- MBCook 4y ago
  Yep. I remember my Asus VP6 dying of the dreaded capacitor plague.
- f0e4c2f7 4y ago
  Back in these days I worked at a small electronics shop run by an electrical engineer. People would come in saying their PC didn't work. He would pop it open, take out the motherboard, go "ah yes, puffy caps. See right there", then open a drawer full of recycled capacitors, and desolder the bad ones and resolder correct ones back on. And it worked! The shop ultimately closed but I still think back to that and a few other tricks as especially impressive.
  - 4y ago
snarfy 4y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capacitor_plague https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capacitor_plague
stevespang 4y ago
[dead]
analog31 4y ago
For a few years, I got free LCD monitors for the entire family, for the price of a small bag of replacement caps. Eventually those monitors somehow shrank, and became too small to use. ;-)
r3trohack3r 4y ago
Oh man, I worked in a small PC repair shop in high school during this window of time and replaced/repaired a tonne of motherboards. I saved all the motherboards at the time - in college I papered my walls with several hundred of them as an art installation and it look rad.
- koofdoof 4y ago
  You must still have a picture of that right?
hyperion2010 4y ago
I think I still have a motherboard from '03 bad caps event in a box somewhere, was a parting gift from a friend who moved abroad.
AdrianB1 4y ago
It is not just Dell and capacitors, all the companies at that time did it (tried to hide the problem) and all the companies try even today to hide any problems with their products. With Dell computer failed, with Boeing planes crashed, some problems are widespread but not too dangerous and some are extremely bad (example: Takata airbags). There is a financial incentive to hide the problems under the rug and the skeletons in the closets, especially in the USA where you can buy your way out with a settlement and not recognizing any fault.
- neilv 4y ago
  https://www.servethehome.com/intel-atom-c2000-series-bug-quiet/ https://www.servethehome.com/intel-atom-c2000-series-bug-qui...
mixmastamyk 4y ago
I don't think this affected me. Was trying to figure out why. Believe it was because I was still using Gateway then Sony computers at the time.
fomine3 4y ago
> Here’s a note to any would-be secret formula stealers: take the whole formula, not just part of it. Add: Test it well even if you think it's perfectly duplicated
harry8 4y ago
This is the way of Dell. I bought one of their laptops that has fried itself because you can't close dell laptops and put them in your bag as though it was a laptop, you have to shut them down and wait to close the lid. FFS. Of course just out of warranty and you cannot even contact them to enquire if they're happy with that being what they are as a company. Dell is way overpriced for the quality you get. Compare to Samsung where I had a tv with bad caps out of warranty and they came to my house, quickly replaced the power supply and left a note asking if I was happy with the service. I was. I am. "It wasn't just Dell" There were fraudsters who hadn't been prosecuted when dell was doing this so don't criticise Dell. Yeah...
- cunidev 4y ago
  I fell for the XPS hype around 2017, when all reviews were praising those machines as the best non-Apple laptops ever made. Turns out mine was pretty badly done, and trying hard to imitate a MacBook Air down to the motherboard, yet half of the components of my (heavily used) XPS 13 showed to be quite unreliable within just few years sadly. Having said that, what's the most reliable, decently portable laptop around for a Linux-oriented developer? I keep hearing bad things about newer Lenovos as well
  - harry8 4y ago
    I replaced mine with a second-hand lenovo t480s and it's the best laptop I have ever owned, by a huge margin. I'm astounded how good it is. Paid A$500 (~$USD 350) for it. Installed linux, everything I care about just worked. (I don't care about finger print readers, maybe that just works too? Hate it either way so dunno). I set the power setting to "power saver" on the incredibly obvious and discoverable gui selector and I get 10 hours out of the battery. A battery which I did not even replace. You want me to list annoyances, well I can, and they're all minor and all to do with choices that my linux distro made. Now I've heard brand new lenovos aren't as well supported as 2-3 year old models and I've been hearing that for more than a decade so there is probably something to it. Seems like enough linux devs use them that it shakes out really nicely in that 2-3 years. If this one exploded I'd probably be looking for another one just like it second hand. Can't tell you about other T series or X1s or all of the other wild and wonderful lenovo "thinkpads" some of which those who claim to know say "thinkpad yeah, but not really..." Just the T480s I'm saying here is a beautiful machine. So that met my specs. But what to do is go to the relevant thinkpad page on wikipedia [1] and all the models and specs are listed there. Use it to look through the places where you get ex-corporate and ex-govt laptops. Find the thinkpad that meets your needs. Vastly cheaper sure, but don't overlook just how much /better/ and higher quality it is than anything Dell have for sale. Support won't be worse if something breaks either. I can burn through 4 of these for the price of a Dell but somehow I doubt that will happen or anything like it in the same amount of time as the Dell was actually working. Seems like you can close it and stick it in your bag like it's a laptop too, which you can't with the Dell because it isn't despite the advertising. [1] eg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ThinkPad_T_series https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ThinkPad_T_series
tcbyrd 4y ago
I was working in a Dell call center in 2007 when this plague started. As soon as I pulled up the service tag I could tell how the call was going to go. Yellow lights on the back indicating power but no successful POST. Specific chassis manufactured in a specific time range. There was a massive recall but most people don’t return their working machine, so it took months before the calls slowed down.
- 2000UltraDeluxe 4y ago
  A few years earlier, Compaq, my first helpdesk job, had similar issues with caps in their PSU's. The normal problem statement would be that the computer simply went out with a loud bang. One client once called regarding 80 Evo's who'd all gone out, one after another, over the course of a single day.
berjin 4y ago
Companies love to hide hardware faults. I was the owner of the first Samsung Galaxy S phone. The GSP antenna was really dysfunctional and yet Samsung promised a software update would fix it. The location signals it could receive were almost entirely based off Wifi and cell towers and the accuracy was around 50-100 meters instead of usual 5-10 metres. As a result I couldn't use basic location based apps like driving navigation. At the same time Apple had a cell antenna problem whereby holding the phone 'wrong' would degrade the signal.
twawaaay 4y ago
I have a Dell U3011 (flagship 30" monitor from 2011). Died due to capacitor. The funny thing is, this monitor looks like it was designed to die. Essentially, the smoothing capacitor was placed directly in the stream of hot air going up. Loads of better ways to organise the board or just move the capacitor but no, the capacitor had to be in the worst possible place for it. I replaced the capacitor with one specced for much higher temp and it is still going.
- mrguyorama 4y ago
  The person who laid out the power board likely never even knew the person who designed the ventilation. They might not even have been in the same company.
  - twawaaay 4y ago
    Nah, thermal design is a thing. Especially for a device that draws constant 100W and has no active cooling or heatsinks. I am an amateur, but even I know to take this stuff into account when designing my boards. Like being aware which components are sensitive to temperature, which components emit a lot of heat, and what kind of resistances to ambient and ambient temperatures I may have. The power board is a part of large board that is specifically designed for this particular housing so there is no question about orientation.
WalterBright 4y ago
My Carver amp was purchased in 1982. 40 years old, I run it all day every day. My computers from 20 years ago, not so lucky. They're all dead.
mastax 4y ago
You can tell the engineers who lived through this time period because they still scrutinize electrolytic caps. E.g. Dave from EEVBlog always goes straight to the caps in whatever he takes apart. It doesn't seem to be much of an issue nowadays but the memory persists.
wsc981 4y ago
Had a bad capacitors problem with my iMac G5 at the time: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IMac_G5 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IMac_G5 When sending back to Apple, my motherboard got probably replaced by an identical refurbished motherboard or some such. Either way, after a couple of months, again leaking capacitors. At some point I got angry with Apple, but by then my Mac was outside of warranty. They offered me a discount on next purchase at Apple Store, but I declined. It left a bad taste in my mouth regarding Apple. Still kept buying Macs for the next few years and luckily no other Macs had issues. But at that point I was sure I would never again buy a first gen (major redesign) product from Apple ever again. I'd rather wait until the early bugs get sorted out and buy a gen 2 or 3 version of the product. I do hope in the future I can switch to Linux, but right now for work I kinda need Macs still (iOS dev). Some guy with a similar experience as me at the time: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/377158?answerId=1800991022#1800991022 https://discussions.apple.com/thread/377158?answerId=1800991...
magicalhippo 4y ago
Not sure if it was universal, but it felt like the capacitor plague was the start of people actually caring about the components on their motherboards. The reviews I recall back then was basically just performance and money. Then they started to highlight the polymer capacitors which weren't prone to leaking. These days you get detailed info[1] on all kinds of support components, and manufacturers boasting about the number of layers of their PCBs[2]. Maybe just a coincidence, but it felt like it started there. [1]: https://www.tweaktown.com/reviews/8685/asrock-x470-taichi-amd-motherboard-review/index.html#ASRock-X470-Taichi-Circuit-Analysis https://www.tweaktown.com/reviews/8685/asrock-x470-taichi-am... [2]: https://www.gskill.com/product/165/167/1536719010/F4-3600C18D-16GTZRX https://www.gskill.com/product/165/167/1536719010/F4-3600C18...
- Neil44 4y ago
  Yeah I remember the marketing for solid caps or whatever it was kicking in after all those problems.
mrtweetyhack 4y ago
[dead]
oaththrowaway 4y ago
I worked for a school district that was using almost exclusivity Dells during this time frame. I can't even remember how many bulging capacitors I removed and soldered new ones in. I got pretty quick at it.
jchw 4y ago
I have some older DELLs from around that era. Interestingly, among some similar boards, only a specific size of capacitor has failed on them. Thankfully, recapping through-hole capacitors is a pretty easy job.
eitland 4y ago
A customer of mine lost 3 Dell Optiplex DL 270 used as POS terminals seemingly in a few hours just over new year one year around that time. That turned out to be just the start as every one of these machines seemed to fail given enough time and we had 60 of them (some of might have been from an unaffected batch, I left later that year but remember some of them capacitors with "K" stamped on top instead of "+" and I think I never saw one with "K" break - or it might have been the other way around). We had the electrician come in to verify mains power, but luckily we soon caught whiff of the fact that Dell had a capacitor problem on these models. We overcame it with a little luck and by aggressively swapping machines as they failed, using out internal spares as a first line and immediately calling Dell for replacements for each and everyone of them.
chrsmth 4y ago
Are bad capacitors common? I bought a brand new motherboard over the holidays, and one of the capacitors appeared to be leaking [1]. I went back to get it exchanged and the experience was interesting. The representative initially agreed that the capacitor was bad. He grabbed a new board, pulled it out of the bag, and literally the same problem. Same capacitor even, which was unfortunate for me because the new determination was that maybe they're supposed to be like that? They had a tech in the store who claimed that it was residue from some kind of "conformal coating", and that 7/10 boards have capacitors that look like that. Somehow the residue is biased to appear directly under the capacitors, but that wasn't exactly explained. He also claimed that capacitors don't leak, at least the type on this board. Eventually I just asked for one of the 3/10 boards that didn't have that residue, and the store was gracious enough to do that for me, but insisted that there was no issue the whole way. They had to flip through 4 boards before finding one without residue under any capacitors, and I still don't know if I was being unreasonable. [1] https://i.imgur.com/G69ypcv.jpg https://i.imgur.com/G69ypcv.jpg
- asddubs 4y ago
  well, it certainly looks like the cap leaked. new caps don't usually do that even if they're crap. It's also interesting that it was the same one each time, seeing as how all those caps are identical. i do think you made the right call, if it was some sort of glue to prevent vibration, it would be on all of them (it's definitely not conformal coating)
  - chrsmth 4y ago
    Thanks, yeah it is strange that the same capacitor leaked on both boards. Actually there was a second capacitor on my first "bad" board that might have also been leaking, but I never pictured it. It was less obvious. Also, I only saw 2 "bad" boards myself, so maybe it's just coincidence. A friend thought maybe that capacitor was getting squeezed during production, or the board is just designed such that that capacitor is more likely to fail.
    - asddubs 4y ago
SentientAtom 4y ago
I reworked many of their xeon server mobos and several of their switches fixing these issues, still prevalent with tech more than ever. And especially so with flat screens that "just stopped working"
linsomniac 4y ago
As others have mentioned, wasn't just Dell. At the time I had ~120 Supermicro servers, and we started having a lot of power supply failures. It was fairly maddening because we'd have a 1 year old box fail, sitting right next to a 5 year old box with no problems. Worse, it was fairly hard to get replacements of the power supply units we were using for a time. In the end we were always able to keep a couple on hand, but it would often involve a lot of shopping around and sometimes paying a premium. That issue resulted in us switching from the cheaper 1U units with single power supplies (based largely on over a decade of no power supply failures), to the "Fat Twin" 2U systems that had 4 "blades" and redundant power supplies. We were doing small scale dedicated hosting, so low cost of the lower end machines was important, but the mini blade setup evened out the price over 4 nodes, but with a steeper initial chassis cost, and more limited disk expansion.
prewett 4y ago
Part of my role was office sysadmin during that time. We switched from IBM machines to Dell machines right about then, and pretty much all of them failed with bulging capacitors. Unfortunately, Dell support made me go through the whole rigamarole of reseating the (two!) processors, switching them, moving RAM, before agreeing that the board was bad. I've refused to even consider Dell ever since then. I mentioned this to our VP of development once, and was sympathetic to the idea that this was something out of Dell's control. He was NOT sympathetic to it at all. Apparently IBM had refused shipment of the same capacitors, because they actually tested them.

149 points by jdkee 4y ago

I worked for a third-party company covering dell business tech support at the time and we would blanket approve 100s if not 1000s of processor + motherboard replacements (more efficient to just replace both at once) daily dude to bad caps. RIP GX270.

dillutedfixer 4y ago

Oh man, this brings back memories! I worked helpdesk for a mid-sized company in SF these years. Things got so bad with our Dell machines that I would call my local Dell repair tech and he would answer the phone with "Ok how many bulging capacitors this time?". We probably replaced at least 100 motherboards for bad caps in such a short time. Reflecting on that, the amount of e-waste generated from this must have been staggering. Jerry - if you're reading this, you probably single-handedly kept that place running ;)

ethbr0 4y ago
I remember desoldering and replacing caps on my dad's Dell OptiPlex board. Was a good pitch for the value of a computer-related major instead of medicine.
stefan_ 4y ago
That's funny because these days we call Dell all the time for bulging lithium ion batteries in their laptops. I think they don't understand the concept of not charging them to 110%.
- Spooky23 4y ago
  Yeah the Dell bulge rate is like 10x HP. The other fun one is their docks, which had a NIC bug tthat would brick the dock.

NegativeLatency 4y ago

I have one of these that I’m going to be recapping soon actually

sparrish 4y ago

It wasn't just Dell, every manufacturer had bad caps in those years. MSI, ASUS, you name it. They all bought those cheap knock-off capacitors for their boards. They lasted about 6000 hours - we could set it in a calendar and did so many RMAs. For the local 911 center, we'd replace the boards every 4 months, before the caps failed, because they just couldn't tolerate the downtime.

metadat 4y ago
What was the fate of the old, not-yet-dead motherboards?
- savoytruffle 4y ago
  They were dead. Recycled or landfilled. Hopefully the former. The goop leaks out and ruins the board anyway.
  - metadat 4y ago
    I was trying to ask about the fate of the discarded but still working hardware. 4 months is 2920 hours, which is less than the stated 6000 hours to failure. Though only by 2x.
MBCook 4y ago
Yep. I remember my Asus VP6 dying of the dreaded capacitor plague.
f0e4c2f7 4y ago
Back in these days I worked at a small electronics shop run by an electrical engineer. People would come in saying their PC didn't work. He would pop it open, take out the motherboard, go "ah yes, puffy caps. See right there", then open a drawer full of recycled capacitors, and desolder the bad ones and resolder correct ones back on. And it worked! The shop ultimately closed but I still think back to that and a few other tricks as especially impressive.
- 4y ago

snarfy 4y ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capacitor_plague https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capacitor_plague

stevespang 4y ago

[dead]

analog31 4y ago

For a few years, I got free LCD monitors for the entire family, for the price of a small bag of replacement caps. Eventually those monitors somehow shrank, and became too small to use. ;-)

r3trohack3r 4y ago

Oh man, I worked in a small PC repair shop in high school during this window of time and replaced/repaired a tonne of motherboards. I saved all the motherboards at the time - in college I papered my walls with several hundred of them as an art installation and it look rad.

koofdoof 4y ago
You must still have a picture of that right?

hyperion2010 4y ago

I think I still have a motherboard from '03 bad caps event in a box somewhere, was a parting gift from a friend who moved abroad.

AdrianB1 4y ago

It is not just Dell and capacitors, all the companies at that time did it (tried to hide the problem) and all the companies try even today to hide any problems with their products. With Dell computer failed, with Boeing planes crashed, some problems are widespread but not too dangerous and some are extremely bad (example: Takata airbags). There is a financial incentive to hide the problems under the rug and the skeletons in the closets, especially in the USA where you can buy your way out with a settlement and not recognizing any fault.

neilv 4y ago
https://www.servethehome.com/intel-atom-c2000-series-bug-quiet/ https://www.servethehome.com/intel-atom-c2000-series-bug-qui...

mixmastamyk 4y ago

I don't think this affected me. Was trying to figure out why. Believe it was because I was still using Gateway then Sony computers at the time.

fomine3 4y ago

> Here’s a note to any would-be secret formula stealers: take the whole formula, not just part of it. Add: Test it well even if you think it's perfectly duplicated

harry8 4y ago

This is the way of Dell. I bought one of their laptops that has fried itself because you can't close dell laptops and put them in your bag as though it was a laptop, you have to shut them down and wait to close the lid. FFS. Of course just out of warranty and you cannot even contact them to enquire if they're happy with that being what they are as a company. Dell is way overpriced for the quality you get. Compare to Samsung where I had a tv with bad caps out of warranty and they came to my house, quickly replaced the power supply and left a note asking if I was happy with the service. I was. I am. "It wasn't just Dell" There were fraudsters who hadn't been prosecuted when dell was doing this so don't criticise Dell. Yeah...

cunidev 4y ago
I fell for the XPS hype around 2017, when all reviews were praising those machines as the best non-Apple laptops ever made. Turns out mine was pretty badly done, and trying hard to imitate a MacBook Air down to the motherboard, yet half of the components of my (heavily used) XPS 13 showed to be quite unreliable within just few years sadly. Having said that, what's the most reliable, decently portable laptop around for a Linux-oriented developer? I keep hearing bad things about newer Lenovos as well
- harry8 4y ago
  I replaced mine with a second-hand lenovo t480s and it's the best laptop I have ever owned, by a huge margin. I'm astounded how good it is. Paid A$500 (~$USD 350) for it. Installed linux, everything I care about just worked. (I don't care about finger print readers, maybe that just works too? Hate it either way so dunno). I set the power setting to "power saver" on the incredibly obvious and discoverable gui selector and I get 10 hours out of the battery. A battery which I did not even replace. You want me to list annoyances, well I can, and they're all minor and all to do with choices that my linux distro made. Now I've heard brand new lenovos aren't as well supported as 2-3 year old models and I've been hearing that for more than a decade so there is probably something to it. Seems like enough linux devs use them that it shakes out really nicely in that 2-3 years. If this one exploded I'd probably be looking for another one just like it second hand. Can't tell you about other T series or X1s or all of the other wild and wonderful lenovo "thinkpads" some of which those who claim to know say "thinkpad yeah, but not really..." Just the T480s I'm saying here is a beautiful machine. So that met my specs. But what to do is go to the relevant thinkpad page on wikipedia [1] and all the models and specs are listed there. Use it to look through the places where you get ex-corporate and ex-govt laptops. Find the thinkpad that meets your needs. Vastly cheaper sure, but don't overlook just how much /better/ and higher quality it is than anything Dell have for sale. Support won't be worse if something breaks either. I can burn through 4 of these for the price of a Dell but somehow I doubt that will happen or anything like it in the same amount of time as the Dell was actually working. Seems like you can close it and stick it in your bag like it's a laptop too, which you can't with the Dell because it isn't despite the advertising. [1] eg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ThinkPad_T_series https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ThinkPad_T_series

tcbyrd 4y ago

I was working in a Dell call center in 2007 when this plague started. As soon as I pulled up the service tag I could tell how the call was going to go. Yellow lights on the back indicating power but no successful POST. Specific chassis manufactured in a specific time range. There was a massive recall but most people don’t return their working machine, so it took months before the calls slowed down.

2000UltraDeluxe 4y ago
A few years earlier, Compaq, my first helpdesk job, had similar issues with caps in their PSU's. The normal problem statement would be that the computer simply went out with a loud bang. One client once called regarding 80 Evo's who'd all gone out, one after another, over the course of a single day.

berjin 4y ago

Companies love to hide hardware faults. I was the owner of the first Samsung Galaxy S phone. The GSP antenna was really dysfunctional and yet Samsung promised a software update would fix it. The location signals it could receive were almost entirely based off Wifi and cell towers and the accuracy was around 50-100 meters instead of usual 5-10 metres. As a result I couldn't use basic location based apps like driving navigation. At the same time Apple had a cell antenna problem whereby holding the phone 'wrong' would degrade the signal.

twawaaay 4y ago

I have a Dell U3011 (flagship 30" monitor from 2011). Died due to capacitor. The funny thing is, this monitor looks like it was designed to die. Essentially, the smoothing capacitor was placed directly in the stream of hot air going up. Loads of better ways to organise the board or just move the capacitor but no, the capacitor had to be in the worst possible place for it. I replaced the capacitor with one specced for much higher temp and it is still going.

mrguyorama 4y ago
The person who laid out the power board likely never even knew the person who designed the ventilation. They might not even have been in the same company.
- twawaaay 4y ago
  Nah, thermal design is a thing. Especially for a device that draws constant 100W and has no active cooling or heatsinks. I am an amateur, but even I know to take this stuff into account when designing my boards. Like being aware which components are sensitive to temperature, which components emit a lot of heat, and what kind of resistances to ambient and ambient temperatures I may have. The power board is a part of large board that is specifically designed for this particular housing so there is no question about orientation.

WalterBright 4y ago

My Carver amp was purchased in 1982. 40 years old, I run it all day every day. My computers from 20 years ago, not so lucky. They're all dead.

mastax 4y ago

You can tell the engineers who lived through this time period because they still scrutinize electrolytic caps. E.g. Dave from EEVBlog always goes straight to the caps in whatever he takes apart. It doesn't seem to be much of an issue nowadays but the memory persists.

wsc981 4y ago

Had a bad capacitors problem with my iMac G5 at the time: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IMac_G5 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IMac_G5 When sending back to Apple, my motherboard got probably replaced by an identical refurbished motherboard or some such. Either way, after a couple of months, again leaking capacitors. At some point I got angry with Apple, but by then my Mac was outside of warranty. They offered me a discount on next purchase at Apple Store, but I declined. It left a bad taste in my mouth regarding Apple. Still kept buying Macs for the next few years and luckily no other Macs had issues. But at that point I was sure I would never again buy a first gen (major redesign) product from Apple ever again. I'd rather wait until the early bugs get sorted out and buy a gen 2 or 3 version of the product. I do hope in the future I can switch to Linux, but right now for work I kinda need Macs still (iOS dev). Some guy with a similar experience as me at the time: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/377158?answerId=1800991022#1800991022 https://discussions.apple.com/thread/377158?answerId=1800991...

magicalhippo 4y ago

Not sure if it was universal, but it felt like the capacitor plague was the start of people actually caring about the components on their motherboards. The reviews I recall back then was basically just performance and money. Then they started to highlight the polymer capacitors which weren't prone to leaking. These days you get detailed info[1] on all kinds of support components, and manufacturers boasting about the number of layers of their PCBs[2]. Maybe just a coincidence, but it felt like it started there. [1]: https://www.tweaktown.com/reviews/8685/asrock-x470-taichi-amd-motherboard-review/index.html#ASRock-X470-Taichi-Circuit-Analysis https://www.tweaktown.com/reviews/8685/asrock-x470-taichi-am... [2]: https://www.gskill.com/product/165/167/1536719010/F4-3600C18D-16GTZRX https://www.gskill.com/product/165/167/1536719010/F4-3600C18...

Neil44 4y ago
Yeah I remember the marketing for solid caps or whatever it was kicking in after all those problems.

mrtweetyhack 4y ago

[dead]

oaththrowaway 4y ago

I worked for a school district that was using almost exclusivity Dells during this time frame. I can't even remember how many bulging capacitors I removed and soldered new ones in. I got pretty quick at it.

jchw 4y ago

I have some older DELLs from around that era. Interestingly, among some similar boards, only a specific size of capacitor has failed on them. Thankfully, recapping through-hole capacitors is a pretty easy job.

eitland 4y ago

A customer of mine lost 3 Dell Optiplex DL 270 used as POS terminals seemingly in a few hours just over new year one year around that time. That turned out to be just the start as every one of these machines seemed to fail given enough time and we had 60 of them (some of might have been from an unaffected batch, I left later that year but remember some of them capacitors with "K" stamped on top instead of "+" and I think I never saw one with "K" break - or it might have been the other way around). We had the electrician come in to verify mains power, but luckily we soon caught whiff of the fact that Dell had a capacitor problem on these models. We overcame it with a little luck and by aggressively swapping machines as they failed, using out internal spares as a first line and immediately calling Dell for replacements for each and everyone of them.

chrsmth 4y ago

Are bad capacitors common? I bought a brand new motherboard over the holidays, and one of the capacitors appeared to be leaking [1]. I went back to get it exchanged and the experience was interesting. The representative initially agreed that the capacitor was bad. He grabbed a new board, pulled it out of the bag, and literally the same problem. Same capacitor even, which was unfortunate for me because the new determination was that maybe they're supposed to be like that? They had a tech in the store who claimed that it was residue from some kind of "conformal coating", and that 7/10 boards have capacitors that look like that. Somehow the residue is biased to appear directly under the capacitors, but that wasn't exactly explained. He also claimed that capacitors don't leak, at least the type on this board. Eventually I just asked for one of the 3/10 boards that didn't have that residue, and the store was gracious enough to do that for me, but insisted that there was no issue the whole way. They had to flip through 4 boards before finding one without residue under any capacitors, and I still don't know if I was being unreasonable. [1] https://i.imgur.com/G69ypcv.jpg https://i.imgur.com/G69ypcv.jpg

asddubs 4y ago
well, it certainly looks like the cap leaked. new caps don't usually do that even if they're crap. It's also interesting that it was the same one each time, seeing as how all those caps are identical. i do think you made the right call, if it was some sort of glue to prevent vibration, it would be on all of them (it's definitely not conformal coating)
- chrsmth 4y ago
  Thanks, yeah it is strange that the same capacitor leaked on both boards. Actually there was a second capacitor on my first "bad" board that might have also been leaking, but I never pictured it. It was less obvious. Also, I only saw 2 "bad" boards myself, so maybe it's just coincidence. A friend thought maybe that capacitor was getting squeezed during production, or the board is just designed such that that capacitor is more likely to fail.
  - asddubs 4y ago

SentientAtom 4y ago

I reworked many of their xeon server mobos and several of their switches fixing these issues, still prevalent with tech more than ever. And especially so with flat screens that "just stopped working"

linsomniac 4y ago

As others have mentioned, wasn't just Dell. At the time I had ~120 Supermicro servers, and we started having a lot of power supply failures. It was fairly maddening because we'd have a 1 year old box fail, sitting right next to a 5 year old box with no problems. Worse, it was fairly hard to get replacements of the power supply units we were using for a time. In the end we were always able to keep a couple on hand, but it would often involve a lot of shopping around and sometimes paying a premium. That issue resulted in us switching from the cheaper 1U units with single power supplies (based largely on over a decade of no power supply failures), to the "Fat Twin" 2U systems that had 4 "blades" and redundant power supplies. We were doing small scale dedicated hosting, so low cost of the lower end machines was important, but the mini blade setup evened out the price over 4 nodes, but with a steeper initial chassis cost, and more limited disk expansion.

prewett 4y ago

Part of my role was office sysadmin during that time. We switched from IBM machines to Dell machines right about then, and pretty much all of them failed with bulging capacitors. Unfortunately, Dell support made me go through the whole rigamarole of reseating the (two!) processors, switching them, moving RAM, before agreeing that the board was bad. I've refused to even consider Dell ever since then. I mentioned this to our VP of development once, and was sympathetic to the idea that this was something out of Dell's control. He was NOT sympathetic to it at all. Apparently IBM had refused shipment of the same capacitors, because they actually tested them.