*Pop* went another one

In the last 6 months, I built myself a new computer and I really love it. It's fast, it's smooth, it's cool, it's hot and it reminds me of some pretty groovy memories from the college days when we tried to do this for a living. (Crescent Computers now seems like such a uninspiring name for it)

Last week when I was trying to copy stuff over from my old computer onto this one, I head a lout *pop*. Almost sounded like a bullet. I had read about these pops online when I was r&d'ing how to solder caps but had never thought I'd get to hear it.

I was not even sure that it was my capacitor that had popped. The old PC was working fine since I had remoted into it. Just to confirm my suspicion, I tried to switch the display to my old PC and the screen went blank. I opened up the desktop and pulled out the video card and here it was, the popped capacitor.

Ironically (or murphionically), it has a different rating that the ones I have 7 more of - the ones I had replaced. This one is a 470mF 16v capacitor. Now, I need to buy 10 more of these and make 6 more posts about how badly I suck at desoldering/soldering, post 3.4 more graphs about my success rate probabilities before I get it to work (or burn down the house).

Here's a pic of the new caps I soldered on 6 months back. It has worked like a charm ever since.

If you ever want to read about the history of bad caps, click here.

Oh, by the way, these are untouched pics were taken with a $135 p&s camera, which I have been using more than 75% of the time these days...