RIP Video Card. He loved to laugh....

I have a Dell SC400 as my primary desktop. It is old, outdated, relatively slow, but a the same time, it has been one of the most stable desktops I've ever had. I've owned it for 6 years now and it has never given me any problems. It has been upgraded over time with more RAM, Hard Drive capacity and Video Card. I have been contemplating upgrading but have never been compelled enough since the stability of this desktop more than made up for it's lack of speed and processing power.

It was working fine until a couple of days back. Today, I turn it on and nothing comes up.

I don't get a BIOS check complete beep either. It's not completing the POST.

Did the initial pushing and pulling of wires but no luck.

After opening it up, I hear two very feeble beeps a few seconds after turning on....unsure whether it's coming from the motherboard or the VGA card.

I suspected the RAM first so I uplugged the DIMMs one at a time to see if any of those had gone bad but no luck.

I finally unplugged the video card and here's what I found....

Seems to me like the two capacitors are toast. I don't have the inclination to go buy a couple of capacitors, a soldering iron, solder wire, unsolder the bad capacitors, solder the new ones, etc. etc.

I think I have a old base VGA card somewhere. Will hunt for it in the morning and plug it in to make sure that is actually the problem.

Ironically, I had bought an external hard drive a couple of weeks back to backup the data on this PC. Never got around to actually backing it up!

Sidebar: Don't you love the fact that a $100 point & shoot can take better macro pics than a $1000 SLR unless you have a dedicated macro lens?