No boot : 9 beeps error SOLVED 242

On Fri, 9 Sep 2005 16:39:19 -0400, "Mike Hollywood"

You can remove them from the board (or there is a circuit floating around to test caps in-circuit but I don't recall any details about it) to do it, but generally speaking unless it's one of those PCChips boards where it looked like they left every 3rd capacitor off the board to cut costs, you should be ok if they look fine, ie- the odds of it being the caps are then lower than (some other as yet unobvious problem). It's all about odds to a certain extent, where to look first and how much time to spend since a thorough test of every little chip is beyond the common skills of PC technicians and not cost-effective in how long it would take relative to the value of the equipment in other cases.

Caps can certainly fail without looking bad but in general the failures seen on motherboards are in the power regulation areas and they do burst, or at least swell and discharge, it is visible.

A board with marginal caps may seem less stable before they fail though, if you have further concerns about the caps then describe the make, model, values of the largest caps used.