computers day

woke up rather late, didn't go NYP today (wednesday). Very odd not to go... probably i'm used to going everyday. It's no wonder some call it my 2nd home -.-

i went through my cupboards that stored my spare CPU, RAM, hard disks and the likes. If anyone is interested in these, let me know!

- Hitachi TravelStar 5K series, 60GB 2.5' SATA (Aug 2006), no warranty
- Hitachi TravelStar, 20GB 2.5' IDE (Nov 2001), no warranty
- Maxtor Fireball D740X-6L, 40GB 3.5' IDE, no warranty (2 units)
- Maxtor DiamondMax+ 45, 15GB 3.5' IDE, no warranty

- AMD Athlon64 3000+, MSI K8N Neo2 Platinum, 256MBx2 Twinmos DDR-400 RAM

- Kingston ValueRAM, PC133 128MB (3 sticks)
- Elpida, DDR2-667 512MB SODIMM (for Centrino Duo laptops)
- Kingston ValueRAM, DDR2-667 512MB SODIMM (for Centrino Duo laptops)

perhaps due to the dust, i had a very bad flu today. kept wiping my nose as i ate at cwp. Took my medicine and recovered at around 10PM just now, in time for my motherboard project!

what's the motherboard project about? While i was in the army, i acquired a hobby of repairing certain computer parts such as motherboards, video cards, power supplies and even routers that have bulging capacitors. These capacitors are made in Taiwan, which i de-soldered and replaced with higher quality Japanese brands, depending on the availability of dimension, capacitance and voltage.

i have done 25 of such repairs, about 80% managed to regain their stability! However i've stopped these repairs as it made better sense (in terms of time, effort and dollars) to buy new and better performing parts.

i have purchased a second hand Asus P4GD1 for my Pentium-M processor. Considering its rarity (Socket 478+PCI Express combo), i decided to replace those crap before anything happens. With my bro's help, we replaced 17 capacitors in 2 hours... a long time.

Yes that's my dining chair. Talk about improvising... hehe.

Asus P4GD1 - took me a year and a bidding war to get this

See the yellow and black cylinders on the left? Those are capacitors

I'm going to work on the row of 6 capacitors near the processor socket

New capacitors (in green), made by Sanyo

The crap caps that were removed

I have a bowl of them. Spoke volumes of how much i done since 2005

i have a video card to do too, but both of us got sick of the whole process by then.

the golden question - will the motherboard work? No idea, I'll get to know when i swap it into my brother's comp this weekend. Help me pray ok.

Here's a website on the history of crap capacitors for the engineering inclined. I learnt my stuff from here... while my brother assisted me in the soldering process since he is engineering trained.