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Spent 6 hours chasing a ghost driver on a Dell Optiplex last Tuesday
A client brought in a Dell Optiplex that would randomly blue screen every 30 minutes, no pattern at all. After swapping the RAM, SSD, and PSU I finally noticed a cracked capacitor under the CPU heatsink that was barely visible without a flashlight. Has anyone else had a hardware fault that was nearly impossible to spot without tearing the whole board apart?
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lucas16511d ago
Did you actually have to pull the motherboard or just get a good angle with the light? Because I've had a few Optiplex boards where the caps are tucked under the VRM heatsink and you have to practically disassemble the whole chassis just to see them. The worst one for me was a bad chipset on a Lenovo ThinkCentre, the capacitor looked fine but the actual BGA had a micro crack that only showed up under 20x magnification. Always wonder how many of these things get tossed in the trash when the fix is a $2 part nobody can find.
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keithyoung12d ago
Ever tried using a jewelers loupe to inspect motherboard components under bright light? That's how I found a hairline crack in a solder joint once, the thing was invisible to the naked eye. A good magnifier and a focused light source will save you hours of guesswork on these tough cases.
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