As you probably noticed, we haven’t posted in awhile, and the site has been up and down more than the stock market lately. It was frustrating trying to figure out exactly what the problem was – banging my head against the proverbial wall – when after talking to some co-workers, I finally figured it out.
That’s bad capacitors to you and me – a case of industrial espionage gone awry. After researching the issue on that site, I cracked open the server upon which this site runs and verified that I indeed did have bad caps.
So what do you do if you have bad caps? One of three things:
- Buy a new machine.
- Try to replace the bad caps.
- Replace the motherboard.
Option one was a last resort for me because aside from the caps, my server was still good, and I didn’t feel like shelling out a few hundred dollars right now. Option two seemed a little daunting, as I have zero experience with motherboards, and the task of ripping the caps off of one and trying to buy the correct ones and solder them on correctly just seemed too easy to screw up.
So I went with option three. I looked on eBay for a motherboard (I had to do some research to find out what would be compatible with my current hardware), and I was fortunate to find an auction that was ending that very day. I bid on it and patiently waited for the auction to end. After fending off a last minute bidder with some shrewd bidding on my part, the motherboard was mine (and pretty inexpensive to boot). Four days later, it was sitting in my basement.
Now we come to the easy part. I was able to swap the new (to me) motherboard with the old one. I couldn’t believe how simple it was to do it. And now my server has new life, and hopefully the bad cap gremlins will stay away.