Tis a sad day

[Mntsnow]

Well last night at around 2am my pdc gave up the ghost and leaked out the "magic smoke" that makes all systems run.

It was a EUPA IBB motherboard that had a PII 333 in it that ran 24x7x365 for 2.5 years! (not to shabby for a cheap generic mobo if I do say so myself).

Attached is a pic of the blown Caps (sorry for the poor image quality as I used the camera from here at work) as I brought the box in with me to diagnose it while at work today to see why it wouldnt complete a full boot. (yes it still is capable of powering on but wont fully boot as it posts and then dies) Anyways Christopher has the same mobo in use in his system with a p3-800 and so I will steal his system and swap the vid, nics & HD'sn (should make a nice boost in speed for my PDC! And I will put Chris into a xp2200 that I just picked up.(not a bad system for an almost 7yr old boy! lol)

[Socal]

Dang :( Is the board RMA-able? There are some noted 'blown cap' problems and some mfrs are RMA-ing their boards...

[Mntsnow]

Nope. This board maker is no longer around! lol..... But ...A guy by the name of Gary Headlee who was the one they interviewed about doing cap replacements due to faulty capacitors in that story that was released a little bit ago is a fellow Utahn and actually a fellow Midvalian (sp?) and he is going to do the repairs on that board so I have a spare for the one I'm stealing from Christopher tonight! lol

[Socal]

Cool :) Very handy for you to have someone you know so close that does that kind of board repair work.

I'll keep him in mind next time I have a board blow that is un-RMA-able.

[GohanSSJ]

Originally posted by Mntsnow
And I will put Chris into a xp2200 that I just picked up.(not a bad system for a almost 7yr old! lol)
I wanna be your son :cry: :D

[Mntsnow]

LOL Gohan :) Just picked up the mobo from Eb over at Techimo for the system for Chris. (It will be here Wednesday so things coming together :) )

[Mntsnow]

Well got home 40 mins ago and the PDC is backup and running now. New backup will happen tonight and the old mobo will be dropped off to be repaired on my way home from work tomorrow!

[EndobioticChaos]

Boy, those caps look pretty nasty! Definitely time for a repair job. :D

Yeah yeah... I know I need to visit these forums more often.:o If you want me to get my tail over here, you know where to find me. :)

BTW, the board Mntsnow bought from me is a Soyo KT333 Dragon Plus. ;)

[EndobioticChaos]

Whoa! Am I going crazy, or did you just do some major changes on this board?? When I was reading through this thread, everything was light gray... now it's all dark gray, with a radical change in the layout! :eek:

[Mntsnow]

LOL Your cookie got reset when you posted :) as there have been MANY changes since you were last here :)

[EndobioticChaos]

Hehe, I just discovered what really happened. Somehow, in the distant past "emerge" got selected as the viewing tileset for my profile, so when I logged in it switched to that. I switched it back to default, since these poor library comps can handle that better (as can my poor eyes :D).

[Mntsnow]

Emerge at one time was the default for a couple of weeks while I did some overhaul work on the site and now the light grey is the default as it's easier loading on most peeps systems :)

[EndobioticChaos]

Yeah, I found out a little more about the changes in the "polls" forum.

Lol, I started to post more about the changes, but realized that's getting a bit for off topic here. :)

[Martoch]

Sweet deal Mntsnow!
:D

Funny "rant" BTW, what a perfect transaction that was...I would have probably bought it if you hadn't...I've got some spare parts lying around and I'm itching to build a new system.

Atta boy to you and EC...

[GohanSSJ]

Damn never knew you were a member here Martoch :)

Why don't you stick around this time :)

[Mntsnow]

Take a look at the repair work that Gary Headlee did for me! *Note You MUST be logged in to view these images*

http://www.xtremepccentral.com/gallery//showgallery.php?cat=507&thumb=1

[Mntsnow]

Gary charges around 50 bucks on average to do the mobo repair work, Some people might take an attitude of "well I can buy a replacement board for 80 or so bucks" but also take note that around 10 bucks of that 50 pays for the priority mailing cost to send it BACK to you when he is finished! so it becomes even more cost effective in my view.

I honestly would say "Take into account the time it would take to rebuild the machine including reloading the OS and all your applications due to a new board requiring the fresh install of your OS and applications to work stable with the new setup" and then weigh the pros & cons of having a board repaired.

With this board being my Primary Domain Controller's motherboard it probably and honestly saved me 20 to 30 hours of labor time by not having to totally start from scratch rebuild that a new mobo/chipset would have required me to do to get the stabilability that I require out of my systems... By doing the repair I only spent 15 mins pulling the board and 15 mins putting the board back into the case as nothing else changed.

Further I will say "I probably wouldn't have spent the money on the repair had this board only supported a 66mhz proc such as the 333 that was in it at the time it died but the board supports up to a p3-1gig and it now runs a p3-800 in it as Christopher is now running a XP2200+ system unless the system was never going to need an upgrade hardware wise or because it was used in a special application and would be very hard or too time consuming to change over to a newer system...

Anyways I now have a 333 chip to sell! lol :)

[Mntsnow]

Btw I will have some better pic's of the exact same motherboard with caps that are starting to blow as Christopher's board is starting to have the same problem and it too will be repaired by Gary and kept as a replacement for my PDC so I guess that will take care of hardware failures in the future :) I also have a hd that is a clone of the running pdc that is set aside and I have the weekly backups for that box too :)

Anyways. I will have much better images of a board with caps going bad in place shortly for you to view as well compaired to the poor image quality I got with the camera from work (the first post in this thead).

:)

[GohanSSJ]

Thats really good work, the soldering looks great too, this surely isnt some amateur.

[EndobioticChaos]

Hey, I have a 694D Pro mobo that got some chips knocked off in shipping damage.(If you really want to know, send me a PM...) I couldn't se how anyone could reattatch them manually, due to all the tightly spaced connections... but maybe a pro has a method that would work. Do you think Gary could fix something like that?

[Mntsnow]

Can you tell me what chips they were? If they are of a "pressed/heat/soldered" type of mounting which is used with surface mounted bga type chips then probably not. Can you take a pic of which chips they where or if you want to send me the mobo I will take it over to Gary and see what he has to say about it and then you can decide if you want to fix it (if possible) or drop kick it.

[EndobioticChaos]

Yeah, I'm pretty sure they're what you describe. Oh well.

[Mntsnow]

that stinks.....I hate shipping damage!

[EndobioticChaos]

Yeah, shipping damage sucks, but at least UPS paid for it. :rolleyes:

[Cwizard]

Hey Snowman:

Do you know they value of these capacitors? I need to replace a few myself.

Cwizard

[Mntsnow]

There is most likely a couple of values. Would have to look at your actual caps and replace them with their correct value counterparts

http://home.att.net/~garyheadlee/faqs.htm

[Mntsnow]

Well I finally got around to getting chris' old mobo over to Gary and again he did a fantastic job on building that board. (I sure hope he never moves away! lol)

[Buzioid]

Does anyone know where to BUY capacitors. Specifically 1500uF and 6.3v.

[Mntsnow]

You can buy them online or get them locally from places like Radio Shack.

[mondobyte]

I'm not to sure that I would trust the quality that Radio Shack sells ... I guess I really got spoiled because I used to live in Indianapolis and there were a lot of parts houses ... now in St. Louis, there are just a few ... one being Gateway Electronics ... They have good quality stuff and great prices ..

[neilslade]

:badass:
(Hey Cowboy, you are obviously a cheat as well? You believe in censorship of all threads that expose a less than perfect business practice? You are one messed up hick.)

Actually, that's completely incorrect, neilslade!


Nixon opened up China and was for decriminializing drug offences-- does this mean he was guiltless in Watergate?

The fact is, Gary Headlee provided me with the worst possible video card repair service possible-- did not even acknowledge receipt of my money and card until after the Police called on him. His advertised 1-2 day turn around ended up being SIX WEEKS-- provable in delivery confirmation of arrival of card at his door and return to my home. The non-functional state of the card upon immediate arrival here, verified by a third party. Headlee changing his story about the status and diagnosis of the card.

You don't like the truth Cowboy? You can't take the truth.
Grow up and learn to read and think.

I believe I did that already, neilslade!
But since your attitude is as bad as your hardware - Bye!
Cowboybooter

[Mntsnow]

For your information Gary has performed several Motherboard repairs for me since the first couple. I have probably had a total of 15 to 20 boards now fixed by Gary with out any issue. I have been to your site NeilSlade and see you have found a total of 3 people who have not been happy with his work/whatever...I know he has had many many times over the amount of done for me done for others and they have been pleased.

Again your welcome to YOUR opinion but don't come into MY house and bad mouth my mods or my site.

Your gone.....