3 ms·
Electrolytic caps go bad when left unpowered for long intervals. The plates depolarize - but can be usually be restored by slowly raising the applied voltage. G
by TerraHertz 13y ago
Electrolytic caps go bad when left unpowered for long intervals. The plates depolarize - but can be usually be restored by slowly raising the applied voltage. Gear that has been left off for years should be slowly powered up over a day or two in small steps with a variac.
Walter Bright! I remember Zortech C, and some micro cross compilers. Thanks.
- ballard 13y agoYeap. Most gear over 10 years old is likely to have this problem. Power supplies, TV, cheap a/v gear. As an interesting note, I cracked open /A/D/S car amps and related gear from 1980's. Crazy engineering... No tantalum or electrolytics anywhere in sight. Props to whomever worked on that.
- WalterBright 13y agoI never thought that that might be necessary. Thanks for the tip! But it's probably too late now anyway :-) I was going to see what I had on that old AT hard disk. I had a 486 that hasn't seen power since 1993. I tried powering that up, but the POST beeps suggested the keyboard controller had failed. Oh well. So I pulled out the drives, and my external IDE controller wouldn't recognize them. But my old Windows XP box's controller did, and I was able to read the old drives (200Mb and 500Mb respectively). It was kinda fun to see what detritus I'd left on them, but sadly no gold bullion. That 486 was the last machine I had that would boot OS/2. Oh well! To the dustbin of history.