parkerp80•3d agoProlific Poster

Chasing a bad capacitor for 90 minutes taught me to check the simple stuff first

I had a Dell Optiplex come in last week that would power on for about 2 seconds then shut right back down. No beeps, no video, just dead. I spent the first hour swapping the power supply, testing the RAM sticks one by one, even reseated the CPU. Nothing worked. Finally I grabbed my multimeter and started poking around the motherboard caps near the CPU socket. There it was, one little capacitor with a slightly bulged top that I missed because it was hiding behind the heatsink. 90 minutes total, and the fix was a $3 part and 15 minutes with a soldering iron. Has anyone else had a simple cap failure take way longer than it should have to diagnose?

2 comments

2 Comments

the_anthony3d ago

Check if that cap was near a spot where thermal paste had dripped?

robert_anderson693d ago

@the_anthony good call, I'd check that first. Thermal paste drips cause all kinds of weird issues.