My poor iMac

[giza]

When I got back from Dorsai Thing a few weeks back, I saw a kernel panic on my iMac, so I tried rebooting it. Upon rebooting it, the screen stayed black and no sounds came from the speakers, nor did the Caps Lock light turn on on the keyboard when I pressed the key. So I took the machine out of service and made a note to open it up at some point

Comments

[greenreaper]

Yeah, that happened to me too. Basically around the turn of the century some cheap Taiwanese capacitors stole a formula for electrolyte fluid which resulted in a buildup of hydrogen within the cells. The end result is that they all started popping their tops a few years later. It's known as the capacitor plague and it was a big scandal at the time.

[electropaw]

Yeah I've seen this happen many times with various pieces of equipment. Crappy caps. Chances are you can "shotgun" all of those filter caps and possibly spare the life of your machine. I've probably saved about a $1000 in electronics/repairs simply by replacing caps blown like these.

[furahi]

I was about to suggest that :)

[thraxarious]

That is sort of a story passed down decade to decade. Its been far too long and the story changes on what country is doing what.

Its more likely a company skimping on parts, or using counterfeit parts (been known to happen.)

[hartree]

They may not have blown simultaneously. Since they're filters for power, you can have them fail in ways (open) that may not stop the machine.

[giza]

That, I did not know. I figured that once a capacitor failed the machine was done for, with possible damage to the motherboard in the process.

That said, it's a 6 year old machine (acquired in summer of 2005), so I'm probably not going to invest the time/money to fix. The G5 chip was underpowered anyway.

[wildw0lf]

That's and they're practically dead at this point with the move to Intel. You can't put any newer MacOS on it than 10.5, and I think some apps now are starting to be written for Intel only - so eventually you'd run into compatibility issues with older web browsers, etc.

[dobie]

Looks like a simple enough fix. I've done it myself on several PC motherboards.

[athauglas]

Assuming that's all that's broken, it's an easy fix.

[giza]

As I've learned! :-P

As I stated elsewhere though, it's just not worth the time/effort for me to fix a 6-year old underpowered machine. I could use the desk space, anyway.

[wagtehdog]

Is this the one that was streaming YouTube to the tv that one time?

...because, if so, I think maybe it was magically friendshipped to death.

[giza]

No, it's the one that was sitting on my spare table.