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 ;)
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%.
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.
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.
yeah, sounds about right. i was also working in a repair shop around the same time, and we knew that we could repair the boards for our customers. but we also knew that we couldn't get away with charging enough to cover the cost of parts and labour unless we offered a warranty, and we couldn't reasonably offer a warranty on old motherboards.
we did make pretty good money selling upgraded new computers to the people whose capacitors had failed. it always felt a bit dirty to sell somebody a new $800 laptop when their old computer was repairable, and i'm sure dell was doing even better than we were on that racket.
The fact that you "get away with it" is only possible if you offer such a needed service, that people are willing to pay.
If you want to be charitable, leave some money on the table for customers who look in dire straits. But you should not feel bad for making a profit (at least until you find yourself buying politicians).
I do board-level repairs on my own stuff (most recently replaced a shorted IC on a laptop motherboard) as it saves them from landfill and is an interesting debugging exercise. It can take a lot of time and effort and complex repairs may not be worth it due to the chance for failure (I've destroyed PCB traces and chips) as well as the fact that some parts simply aren't cost-effective to replace. In the laptop example the many evenings spent reading datasheets and probing circuits definitely cost more than a replacement unit if I billed the hours per my engineer's salary.
When I was a student friends and relatives would give me (nice) broken electronics that they were going to throw out anyways, and if I liked the item (e.g. an expensive camera that I couldn't afford) I would put a lot of effort into fixing it.
I'm close with one of the last repair shops I know of in Germany that still does it. There still seems to be a market for it, but definitely not enough to keep an industry alive.
> but we also knew that we couldn't get away with charging enough to cover the cost of parts and labour unless we offered a warranty
I'm not sure about that. The store charges more than enough to cover it and still gets more business than it can handle while still providing a free warranty for 6-12 months.
Because of that drama, I remember some people (maybe me included, not sure anymore) actually thinking that electrolytic caps just generally had a pretty bad lifetime, and the need for replacement was just reality for products that were expected to last for more than an unreasonably short lifetime.
That's probably also the reason why so many retro enthusiasts just generally "re-cap" almost everything they touch. In a lot of cases, you just don't need to do that, and sometimes it could be worse to replace capacitors not affected by the capacitor plague: Any factory adjustments made to the device could well depend on the exact characteristics of the capacitors that were present in the device when it was manufactured.
Electrolytic caps (especially aluminum) do generally have a pretty bad lifetime. Their specs (capacitance, and internal resistance aka ESR) degrade significantly over time, non-linearly, as temperature (and voltage) go up. At their rated voltage/temperature, lifetime maybe be ten thousand (or less) hours...barely enough to last a full year of 24x7 operation.
This is one reason mining GPUs can be a questionable buy. The miner may have operated them at "low" temperature, but they were on 24x7, whereas a gaming PC may be only on a couple of hours a day a few times a week.
Ultimately it comes down to how much the designers overspec'd components and/or factored in for wiggle room and how much the capacitors can degrade before circuits start acting up enough for the user to notice.
More seriously though, lifetime of a component is generally halved for each ten Kelvin increase. So idling or lightly taxing the card at, say, 60°C instead of 90°C is a 8x longer lifetime alone.
I corrected my text above to read "unreasonably short lifetime" now. In my experience, plenty of products from the 90s and older still seem to work absolutely fine despite their use of electrolytic caps. Yes, some of their parameters may have degraded, but it still seems to be within tolerance for their particular use in the design.
It also depends on how exactly the caps are used. Caps close to a massive heat source, like a power resistor, are likely to dry out relatively quickly, while others, like those used as part of small signal filters, may last literal decades, with not much change in e.g. ESR or capacitance (and hence still conform to factory calibration pretty okay). Admittedly I don't have any hard data for that, only anecdotical experience with measuring ESR and capacitance and saying "this looks fine".
The crucial point is that the "capacitor plague" affected much more than products which were on 24/7 or which had tight tolerances, to the point where it was very well visible to the "casual" consumer. Yes, we may not expect a server mainboard that was on for the last 20 years to still have its caps within spec, but wrt the capacitor plague, the gaming PC you mentioned would have been quickly affected, in an obvious manner, as well.
> while others, like those used as part of small signal filter
I wouldn't expect those to be electrolytic, though. Electrolytic capacitors are mostly used when the exact characteristics are not important, like on a supply bus, where your qualifications are typically either "at least" or "no more" than some value. Tripling capacitance usually has no negative effect on a supply bus but huge change of doing signal conditioning, so something like that is more often going to be a capacitor that is intrinsically more stable.
Good point, but in audio applications for example, for cross-over filters, bipolar electrolytic caps are common. The “calibration”, if any, may be very simple, though.
> lifetime maybe be ten thousand (or less) hours...barely enough to last a full year of 24x7 operation.
Wait, how many of these are in a typical consumer computer? Even if it's just 20 or so (I truly have no idea) I don't get the numbers to add up.
I've run, say, 6 computer-years worth of capacitors with no problems -- under the assumption above this would be 120 capacitor-years. Let's say at this point there's a 50--50 chance I would have experienced problems (this is not a rigorous survival analysis, of course, just something to get started).
If a single capacitor has a lifetime of just one year, then "lifetime" must be defined as the solution to p^120 = 0.5 which is p=99.5 %. Is it correct that when one speaks of the "lifetime" of capacitors one refers to the point where 0.5 % of them no longer work?
If "lifetime" means 50 % no longer work then I would seem to have been extraordinarily lucky (I'm the 10^-35 %!!) -- I don't hold that for very likely.
> Any factory adjustments made to the device could well depend on the exact characteristics of the capacitors that were present in the device when it was manufactured.
Capacitors especially and in general most components age and their specs drift. This is not a valid reason for not replacing components. If something isn’t actually all that old, sure, but capacitors especially are just not precision components over long periods.
For one, electrolytic capacitors can have pretty large tolerance for their initial value. The question then is also whether a fresh cap’s value is closer or further away from the value the old cap initially had compared to what it drifted to.
More generally however, you just don’t need to replace a capacitor in something that works well and that is not anticipated to break catastrophically because of the capacitor plague.
If the caps do eventually drift off so far that it affects operation, replace it then, and then it makes sense to take the opportunity to replace others as well as precautionary measure.
Sometimes you know that a non-plague cap will likely fail because it’s right next to a massive heat source, and you may replace it early with good reason.
But sometimes I see people literally replacing 80 caps or more without reason, when I have the same device sitting at home with its original caps, still doing its job well within spec for years.
> Only later did I learn that it actually seemed to have been industrial espionage gone wrong!
The relevant bit from Wikipedia:
> Industrial espionage was implicated in the capacitor plague, in connection with the theft of an electrolyte formula. A materials scientist working for Rubycon in Japan left the company, taking the secret water-based electrolyte formula for Rubycon's ZA and ZL series capacitors, and began working for a Chinese company. The scientist then developed a copy of this electrolyte. Then, some staff members who defected from the Chinese company copied an incomplete version of the formula and began to market it to many of the aluminium electrolytic manufacturers in Taiwan, undercutting the prices of the Japanese manufacturers. This incomplete electrolyte lacked important proprietary ingredients which were essential to the long-term stability of the capacitors and was unstable when packaged in a finished aluminium capacitor. This faulty electrolyte allowed the unimpeded formation of hydroxide and produced hydrogen gas.
Brother bought a bunch of bad caps for their laser printers during lockdown. Now a year later things are coming home to roost. You can see it on the forums and on YouTube. Failures at right about the same 8-10000 hours, but since they're used in the power supply and printers are plugged in all the time... they die right outside warranty.
Wouldn't be surprised if there's a class action, where everyone gets $5 off a new printer.
Printer companies are all basically evil, but Brother somehow got a decent reputation. I've got an old brother printer that isn't affected by this, and I really hope they do right by their customers here.
Any company can get scammed on crap parts, either because they took a gamble trying to save a few cents or because those parts were all they could get their hands on, but now that's come back to bite them it's up to brother to put things right. It'd be shame for brother to trash their brand over a batch of bad capacitors. I've been happier with my current printer than any printer I've had since I got rid of my old dot matrix Epson, but we're going to need a new printer eventually, and I'd really like to not have to think too much about what brand to get or recommend.
> Any company can get scammed on crap parts, either because they took a gamble trying to save a few cents or because those parts were all they could get their hands on
It's true, though in the latter case, it can't be helped.
I worked at an integrator from 2002-2005. Small outfit, building PCs and servers for businesses and local agencies. As a new member of their engineering department, one of the first issues we got asked to investigate was to look at heightened failures of network cards. Back then, we bought the ubiquitous 3Com 3C-905. All of our PCs were subjected to a battery of functional tests before shipping, and we were finding that an abnormal number of the cards were failing.
We started looking at the failed ones more closely, and found them running extremely hot. These were passively cooled cards, and didn't need a heatsink under normal conditions. But on any of these, you couldn't hold a finger against without burning yourself. Functional ones as well.
We got the batch of serial numbers, and send them to 3Com to ask what might be going on. And the answer we got was that they didn't exist.
A bit of back and forth between 3Com, the distributor (a well-known and established company) and ourselves led us all to believe that they were a counterfit batch that entered the supply chain. We tracked down all of the cards from that order, and opened up every boxed PC that was to ship with one (I'll never forget the company president with his business shirt sleeves rolled up and a box cutter in his hand. He set the tone) and we pulled out every one.
We sourced from reputable places, and I don't recall another instance of that occurring while I was there. But it was an interesting event in my career, and one I'll never forget.
I wasn't paying that much attention, but the way I remember it was that some major manufacturer of capacitors was producing bad ones for a while. Not so much "cheap knock offs" as more like Takata airbags.
The only capacitor manufacturer that comes to mind now is Kemet and their wikipedia page doesn't mention the episode so I don't know.
>They lasted about 6000 hours - we could set it in a calendar
I commented it on HN [1] not long ago and people said I was spreading conspiracy theory.
And how it used to be a thing called capacitor marketing [2] and how Apple / Mac "used to " set itself apart.
And let me just say this again because somehow the act of understand electronics is completely lost on modern days internet or more like in the West, planned obsolescence is still a thing and just because they aren't as bad as they were ( 6 months or at best 12-18 months ), doesn't mean they are not doing it. And more often than not, it is still the same old capacitor trick 20 years later.
Edit: And some comments below are writing just about that.
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. ;-)
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.
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.
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...
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
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.
I think not all Dell laptops are like that, at least the older ones weren't. The last one I had for work could be closed and carried around just fine without fear of it catching on fire.
Unfortunately though my company deployed new Dell laptops to everybody, and yes I do have to shut it down whenever I want to put it in the bag. Always great to see technology move backwards...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
You certainly could be right. I don't know too much about capacitors, but from what I'm seeing it looks like it could also be a "Hybrid polymer capacitor" [1], which would have some liquid in it [2]. This is also an MSI board.
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"
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 158 ms ] threadJerry - if you're reading this, you probably single-handedly kept that place running ;)
Was a good pitch for the value of a computer-related major instead of medicine.
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.
4 months is 2920 hours, which is less than the stated 6000 hours to failure. Though only by 2x.
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.
yeah, sounds about right. i was also working in a repair shop around the same time, and we knew that we could repair the boards for our customers. but we also knew that we couldn't get away with charging enough to cover the cost of parts and labour unless we offered a warranty, and we couldn't reasonably offer a warranty on old motherboards.
we did make pretty good money selling upgraded new computers to the people whose capacitors had failed. it always felt a bit dirty to sell somebody a new $800 laptop when their old computer was repairable, and i'm sure dell was doing even better than we were on that racket.
The fact that you "get away with it" is only possible if you offer such a needed service, that people are willing to pay.
If you want to be charitable, leave some money on the table for customers who look in dire straits. But you should not feel bad for making a profit (at least until you find yourself buying politicians).
When I was a student friends and relatives would give me (nice) broken electronics that they were going to throw out anyways, and if I liked the item (e.g. an expensive camera that I couldn't afford) I would put a lot of effort into fixing it.
> but we also knew that we couldn't get away with charging enough to cover the cost of parts and labour unless we offered a warranty
I'm not sure about that. The store charges more than enough to cover it and still gets more business than it can handle while still providing a free warranty for 6-12 months.
I.e., broadly speaking, like lightbulbs.
Only later did I learn that it actually seemed to have been industrial espionage gone wrong! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capacitor_plague
That's probably also the reason why so many retro enthusiasts just generally "re-cap" almost everything they touch. In a lot of cases, you just don't need to do that, and sometimes it could be worse to replace capacitors not affected by the capacitor plague: Any factory adjustments made to the device could well depend on the exact characteristics of the capacitors that were present in the device when it was manufactured.
This is one reason mining GPUs can be a questionable buy. The miner may have operated them at "low" temperature, but they were on 24x7, whereas a gaming PC may be only on a couple of hours a day a few times a week.
Ultimately it comes down to how much the designers overspec'd components and/or factored in for wiggle room and how much the capacitors can degrade before circuits start acting up enough for the user to notice.
Never met such a gamer
It also depends on how exactly the caps are used. Caps close to a massive heat source, like a power resistor, are likely to dry out relatively quickly, while others, like those used as part of small signal filters, may last literal decades, with not much change in e.g. ESR or capacitance (and hence still conform to factory calibration pretty okay). Admittedly I don't have any hard data for that, only anecdotical experience with measuring ESR and capacitance and saying "this looks fine".
The crucial point is that the "capacitor plague" affected much more than products which were on 24/7 or which had tight tolerances, to the point where it was very well visible to the "casual" consumer. Yes, we may not expect a server mainboard that was on for the last 20 years to still have its caps within spec, but wrt the capacitor plague, the gaming PC you mentioned would have been quickly affected, in an obvious manner, as well.
I wouldn't expect those to be electrolytic, though. Electrolytic capacitors are mostly used when the exact characteristics are not important, like on a supply bus, where your qualifications are typically either "at least" or "no more" than some value. Tripling capacitance usually has no negative effect on a supply bus but huge change of doing signal conditioning, so something like that is more often going to be a capacitor that is intrinsically more stable.
Wait, how many of these are in a typical consumer computer? Even if it's just 20 or so (I truly have no idea) I don't get the numbers to add up.
I've run, say, 6 computer-years worth of capacitors with no problems -- under the assumption above this would be 120 capacitor-years. Let's say at this point there's a 50--50 chance I would have experienced problems (this is not a rigorous survival analysis, of course, just something to get started).
If a single capacitor has a lifetime of just one year, then "lifetime" must be defined as the solution to p^120 = 0.5 which is p=99.5 %. Is it correct that when one speaks of the "lifetime" of capacitors one refers to the point where 0.5 % of them no longer work?
If "lifetime" means 50 % no longer work then I would seem to have been extraordinarily lucky (I'm the 10^-35 %!!) -- I don't hold that for very likely.
What else am I missing?
Capacitors especially and in general most components age and their specs drift. This is not a valid reason for not replacing components. If something isn’t actually all that old, sure, but capacitors especially are just not precision components over long periods.
More generally however, you just don’t need to replace a capacitor in something that works well and that is not anticipated to break catastrophically because of the capacitor plague.
If the caps do eventually drift off so far that it affects operation, replace it then, and then it makes sense to take the opportunity to replace others as well as precautionary measure.
Sometimes you know that a non-plague cap will likely fail because it’s right next to a massive heat source, and you may replace it early with good reason.
But sometimes I see people literally replacing 80 caps or more without reason, when I have the same device sitting at home with its original caps, still doing its job well within spec for years.
The relevant bit from Wikipedia:
> Industrial espionage was implicated in the capacitor plague, in connection with the theft of an electrolyte formula. A materials scientist working for Rubycon in Japan left the company, taking the secret water-based electrolyte formula for Rubycon's ZA and ZL series capacitors, and began working for a Chinese company. The scientist then developed a copy of this electrolyte. Then, some staff members who defected from the Chinese company copied an incomplete version of the formula and began to market it to many of the aluminium electrolytic manufacturers in Taiwan, undercutting the prices of the Japanese manufacturers. This incomplete electrolyte lacked important proprietary ingredients which were essential to the long-term stability of the capacitors and was unstable when packaged in a finished aluminium capacitor. This faulty electrolyte allowed the unimpeded formation of hydroxide and produced hydrogen gas.
I sometimes wonder, how those secret sauces can remain so secret. After all, you have to order them in rather large batches every week, month, year..
E: I can't believe something so easy to Google is being downvoted as though it's false info: https://www.reddit.com/r/retrogaming/comments/ib7nyh/replaci...
Wouldn't be surprised if there's a class action, where everyone gets $5 off a new printer.
Any company can get scammed on crap parts, either because they took a gamble trying to save a few cents or because those parts were all they could get their hands on, but now that's come back to bite them it's up to brother to put things right. It'd be shame for brother to trash their brand over a batch of bad capacitors. I've been happier with my current printer than any printer I've had since I got rid of my old dot matrix Epson, but we're going to need a new printer eventually, and I'd really like to not have to think too much about what brand to get or recommend.
It's true, though in the latter case, it can't be helped.
I worked at an integrator from 2002-2005. Small outfit, building PCs and servers for businesses and local agencies. As a new member of their engineering department, one of the first issues we got asked to investigate was to look at heightened failures of network cards. Back then, we bought the ubiquitous 3Com 3C-905. All of our PCs were subjected to a battery of functional tests before shipping, and we were finding that an abnormal number of the cards were failing.
We started looking at the failed ones more closely, and found them running extremely hot. These were passively cooled cards, and didn't need a heatsink under normal conditions. But on any of these, you couldn't hold a finger against without burning yourself. Functional ones as well.
We got the batch of serial numbers, and send them to 3Com to ask what might be going on. And the answer we got was that they didn't exist.
A bit of back and forth between 3Com, the distributor (a well-known and established company) and ourselves led us all to believe that they were a counterfit batch that entered the supply chain. We tracked down all of the cards from that order, and opened up every boxed PC that was to ship with one (I'll never forget the company president with his business shirt sleeves rolled up and a box cutter in his hand. He set the tone) and we pulled out every one.
We sourced from reputable places, and I don't recall another instance of that occurring while I was there. But it was an interesting event in my career, and one I'll never forget.
The only capacitor manufacturer that comes to mind now is Kemet and their wikipedia page doesn't mention the episode so I don't know.
I commented it on HN [1] not long ago and people said I was spreading conspiracy theory.
And how it used to be a thing called capacitor marketing [2] and how Apple / Mac "used to " set itself apart.
And let me just say this again because somehow the act of understand electronics is completely lost on modern days internet or more like in the West, planned obsolescence is still a thing and just because they aren't as bad as they were ( 6 months or at best 12-18 months ), doesn't mean they are not doing it. And more often than not, it is still the same old capacitor trick 20 years later.
Edit: And some comments below are writing just about that.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29296839
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28468287
Add: Test it well even if you think it's perfectly duplicated
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...
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
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
Unfortunately though my company deployed new Dell laptops to everybody, and yes I do have to shut it down whenever I want to put it in the bag. Always great to see technology move backwards...
One client once called regarding 80 Evo's who'd all gone out, one after another, over the course of a single day.
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.
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.
My computers from 20 years ago, not so lucky. They're all dead.
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=1800991...
Maybe just a coincidence, but it felt like it started there.
[1]: https://www.tweaktown.com/reviews/8685/asrock-x470-taichi-am...
[2]: https://www.gskill.com/product/165/167/1536719010/F4-3600C18...
I can't even remember how many bulging capacitors I removed and soldered new ones in. I got pretty quick at it.
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.
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
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.
https://www.gigabyte.com/webpage/8/article_02_all_solid.htm
[1] https://www.digikey.ca/en/products/filter/aluminum-polymer-c... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polymer_capacitor