So my primary blogging computer is down! Yesterday morning we had a power blip and when I went to boot the bad boy back up after that, it wouldn't turn on. I've had some issues with it before coming back on after a power failure but I've always been able to get it pumping again. Not this time. I'd hit the power switch and no sooner would the fans turn on, they'd turn off again. So I took the computer out of it's location in the desk cubby to take a peak inside. As I pulled the computer out I heard some rattling inside. This intrigued me a little, so I opened the beast up and shook it a little to see what was rattling. It was coming from the computer power supply. So I took that apart and opened it up and low and behold I found the problem. An exploded capacitor! The cap was what was rattling and it had completely blown off the leads and whatever foo is inside one of those things. There was a second capacitor with gunk oozing out of it and it looked like it was ready to explode all puffed out and stuff.

After seeing this I recalled an article I read more than a year ago that detailed failing motherboards with faulty capacitors that would explode. We even had some bad PCs at The Workplace due to this problem. Apparently these bad capacitors were inside power supplies as well. Although the power supply is under a 5 year manufacturer's warrenty, I decided against going that route for a replacement. I figured by the time I paid for the post and shipping costs, and whatever other hidden costs that went with it, plus the fact that me opening the thing up probably voided the warranty anyway, I decided to just by a new one. The thing only cost me about $50 from TigerDirect plus this one claims to be rather silent. Like any normal computer geek (I do try to keep that low key by the way) I'm anxious to get my hands on the new one and see how she runs!