OT: Removing Electrolytic cap residue

Ok, working on thousands of mobo's and PC's (ick, i know) over the past decade, I must agree and disagree. Most Asus and Tyan boards have been ok, but, about 3-4 years ago, they also had the bad cap issues. The Asus A7V (early Socket A AMD Athlon/Duron line) and some of the 266 series had a leaky cap/cap failure issue for a while. Ended up replacing about 20 or so boards because of this (shop was too cheap to just replace caps when another board was on hand and took less time to swap boards than to fix the damned problem). As with the Tyans, some of the P-III socket 370 boards obviously, much less than other manufacturers, such as Abit (the whole KT7/KT7A series was known to be an 8/10 failure rate for that time frame. later revisions, I believe called the 1.3 to 1.6 revisions, did not have these issues as different caps were used.). As far as I could remember, if the caps leaked that badly, there was a good chance that there was damage to other circuitry on the board and any attempts to repair should just go to replacing the board at that point to limit headaches from voltage and circuit instability caused by voltage flux that from caps going bad and could not figure out why it was giving errors in diags/Winblows until we re-examined the board with a magnifying glass and swapped out all the other components (ram, cpu, vid card, etc) and found there was a small trace going from an area near one of the caps to the northbridge that was a bit messed up. Replaced the board and things were still a bit messed up, had to replace the ram too and then everything cleared up. Voltage flux is nasty as sometimes, it is an unseen killer of parts. Best bet, if unsure if stuff is still safe, replace it and let someone else worry about headaches. -John Boffemmyer IV At 07:32 AM 4/5/2005, you wrote: