the magic smoke got out

About five years ago, I built my home computer. At the time, it was a middle-of-the-road machine with good components. Alas, two weeks ago the machine failed… completely. There’s an old joke that electronics run on “magic smoke.” This is a reference to the acrid smell emitted by electronics when something goes terribly wrong.

Although my machine didn’t actually emit any “magic smoke,” it did come to a complete failure – no lights, no POST messages, no indication of life. It was an ex-parrot. I’ll tag the geek specifics lower in the story.

After digging around in the garage for a couple of hours, I managed to get a partially operational “Franken-PC” running. It won’t do sound, can’t talk to the printer, and is very slow – but it gets me onto the Internet.

I’m hoping to secure enough parts to bring the machine into the current millennia within the next couple of weeks. Until then, two of the eight cylinders are operating. 

Geek stuff: The failure is centered around old, bulging capacitors on the motherboard. It appears that several of the old electrolytic capacitors around the power supply connection socket have failed. There are others (associated with USB ports) that had failed previously. Its seems a dubious use of time and money to attempt to replace the capacitors on this five-year-old motherboard.

The Franken-PC motherboard actually is in worse shape (for capacitor failure), but none of the problems are critical for CPU/RAM/Network/disk controller, so the machine gets me onto the Internet. The Franken-PC is a single-core, mobile AMD processor with 2G RAM. It clocks out performance that is similar to a nine-year-old Pentium 4 chip. If only doing a single task (one browser, or just Word) it does okay. Just don’t attempt to run multiple applications, anything requiring heavy processing (such a video editing), anything that requires sound, or anything that needs to be printed.

I’m hoping to replace the motherboard, CPU, and RAM in the next few weeks. We’ll see what kind of deal I can find at NewEgg.com!