All, Got a Mac Classic, swapped non-functional hard drive, installed RAM, nearly got it working for my 10-year-old. But.... First pass, no sound out. Not speaker, not headphone connector. Wait, if you hold your ear right up against it, you hear a *little* bit. Hm. Second pass, a week or so later, won't boot. Hmm. Opened it back up, looked over everything ... what's this? There's some stuff on the digital board. Wonder what could leave an oily stain, and how it got there in the first place without leaving tracks on the inside of the case, the CRT, the disk drives, etc. etc.? Well, won't hurt to clean it off, I thought ... then the penny dropped and I realized that there were *three* little islands of gunge, and they were centered on the three groups of what look like my favorite nemesis .... capacitors! <gnashing of teeth> Many q-tips and much isopropanol later, it boots, but it's still quiet - too quiet - and I have a bad feeling about how long it'll keep running before I have to clean it again. There's a bit of corrosion on one lead of the sound chip, but I can still hear a very very faint edition of the sound it's supposed to make. The Classic has a surface-mount digital board. The components I suspect are metal can devices, lots of them with the same marking (which I neglected to write down) and one different. Each has a tiny flat plastic-looking isolator or something between it and the logic board. 1) Is there a preferred solvent I can squirt under those things and the sound chip that'll pick up capacitor gunge (or whatever it is) better than Isopropanol? Is the old standby dihydrogen monoxide a good bet? (I have plenty of that.) 2) If (sigh. When) I have to pull those things off, I will need a hot-air soldering station, correct? My thought is, cut up an aluminum can to make an air dam isolating the cap. from the rest of the board, then blast it with hot air until it flies off or vaporizes. Is that close to right? 3) How do I get replacements, and how do I slap those back down on the board? Is the code on the top all I need to order more? Hints appreciated. Hm. Come to think, maybe I better double-check that the swapped-out hard drive was really dead. The SCSI port might have been the first casualty of the capacitor scourge. -- - Mark 210-379-4635 ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Large Asteroids headed toward planets inhabited by beings that don't have technology adequate to stop them: Think of it as Evolution in Fast-Forward.