Well, it's been busy, busy, busy what with the new addition to the family. And in my spare time I've been fixing a few things. The other week it was a Samsung 19" LCD TV rescued from a skip (thrown there, presumably, because it was completely dead). I changed all the capacitors on the main power board and hey presto: a working LCD TV for my kitchen :). Tonight, I have been mostly fixing my mum's Netgear broadband router. The router was powering on but behaving very oddly with intermittent wireless/wired functionality and no ADSL connection whatsoever. I flicked the router open and immediately noted that four capacitors were bulging (three 6.3v 470uf and the 16v 220uf one). I didn't have any of these spare but I did have an old PC motherboard with a bunch of what I needed on. So, to cut a long story short I removed the faulty caps from the router's main board and replaced them with ones desoldered from the old PC motherboard. Result: router now working fine. A subsequent Google search suggests that blown caps in this router is not an uncommon problem.
This is part-way through the repair and the caps I've changed are highlighted. The replacement 470uf caps I've used are 16v rather than 6.3v (beggars can't be choosers) so its a bit of a tight squeeze. Interestingly, the caps that have blown are all one particular make. There are other caps on the board made by a different company and these are all in good order.
You can see how the still-to-be-changed 220uf cap in this picture (second one in from the left) has blown...
More soon, no doubt!
