OT: Removing Electrolytic cap residue

Adrian wrote: [...] I don't know, but my solution to this has been to replace the affected motherboards. Those capacitors really are necessary for the board to be reliable, as they are part of the power supply for the internal CPU operating voltage. If some of them went bad, you can be pretty sure that the rest will too, so they all need to be replaced. The local surplus places have old motherboards for about $20; the cost of a set of new capacitors is more than that. When I factor in my time to replace them, it would even be cost-effective to buy a brand new motherboard. This normally happens to motherboards that were made using cheap Taiwanese electrolytic capacitors. Someone stole the electrolyte formula from one of the Japanese capacitor manufacturers, but they apparently missed some ingredients that were essential to stabilize it, or perhaps they left those out deliberately to make the stuff cheaper. The result is that multiple Taiwanese capacitor vendors were making defective capacitors for quite a long time. I'll note that I have never seen this problem with any of my Asus or Tyan motherboards, only with cheap crap like ECS which other people buy then expect me to support. Eric