Mailinglist Archive: opensuse (3964 mails)

["Paul W. Abrahams" <abrahams@xxxxxxx>]

I know this is somewhat off-topic, but I want to alert everyone to the problem 
of exploding capacitors on motherboards, which I just learned of tonight.  A 
friend of mine was hit by it and the defective capacitor caused a short that 
took the power supply and monitor with it.  Your Linux system is only as good 
as the hardware underneath it!

The problem is that some Asian manufacturers have been turning out these 
defective capacitors, based on a stolen electrolyte formula that they didn't 
get quite right.   The bad capacitors have appeared on ABIT boards as well as 
on computers from Dell and IBM.  If you think this might be an urban legend, 
just check the article in IEEE Spectrum:

   http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/WEBONLY/resource/feb03/ncap.html

Paul