[T3] Goin' to hell in a handcart!

[Jim Adney]

On 6 Jan 2013 at 12:35, Jonathan Stiles wrote:

> Dells were the absolute worst casualties. We got to the point of
> sending out letters to incoming student to NOT purchase Dell items, as
> they were clogging our tech support system. 

Around 2000, a story broke about some faulty alum electrolytic 
capacitors made in Taiwan for, I believe, about 6 months. These 
capacitors were made with an incomplete electrolyte solution that 
caused the caps to have a short lifetime.

Since this was 1999 or 2000, I figured that PCs made in 2004 could 
not have those products in them, but the IT people here at UW have 
confirmed that the GX270s made that late all seem to have this 
problem. Maybe it's actually a different problem, since these PCs 
lasted ~8 years. Maybe the motherboard design is marginal, to the 
point that stress on these caps causes them to fail early.

We had 2 GX270s here. Both made in 2004 and both showed the same crud 
on top of the same motherboard capacitors.  

I've got 2 kits of replacement capacitors coming from Hong Kong. The 
same ebay seller has kits for a number of similar Dell PCs, as well 
as for some Mac products.

Sorry, this has gotten off-topic, but it has some relevance, since it 
affects my ability to correspond with the Type 3 list. (There! I 
managed to ease "Type 3" into this conversation.)

;-)

-- 
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Jim Adney, jadney at vwtype3.org
Madison, Wisconsin, USA
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