Yes­ter­day morn­ing on the way to school I hap­pened across a moth­er­board com­plete with proces­sor in a com­puter case dumped on the side of the road, which I then pro­ceeded to pick up (soggy dust and all — it’d been rain­ing tor­ren­tially the night before), place in my bag, and lug around until I got home 10 or so hours later.

After I’d attacked it at school with tis­sues for a while, it was finally dry and (rel­a­tively) dusted, so I shoved it back in the bag and took it out when I got home, where it sat untouched until this after­noon, when I looked at it again. On sec­ond inspec­tion, I found far more dust residue than I’d thought, so I pro­ceeded to take the AGP slot clip off (that’s the black thing around the brown thing per­pen­dic­u­lar to the three black strips close to the mid­dle of the board) in order to clean gunk from between it and the green caps (the green cir­cu­lar things next to the black thing around the… you get the idea). Bad idea.

The clip has a fas­tener at the end near­est the rear of the moth­er­board (the side with the purple/pink thing next to the two sil­ver things, or the bot­tom of the pic­ture above), which slides up and out, so detach­ing that end was fine. It seems, in hind­sight, that after that was undone the clip was to be removed by sim­ply pulling upwards, not by slid­ing out back­wards. Because I slid it out back­wards next, and that was a disaster.

You can see in the image above that C399 is present and accounted for, but C400 shows two sol­der ter­mi­nals and a whole heap of not-much else. It’s not per­fect focus, but that’s one of the first times I’ve seri­ously used the macro fea­ture on my dig­i­tal cam­era, so I reckon it was decent! That shot from a dis­tance of about 0.03m, by the way (You can click on the image above for a higher res­o­lu­tion ver­sion of it). Basi­cally, as the clip moved back­wards, it forced past the capac­i­tor, detach­ing it from the moth­er­board (I fig­ured the stress I felt was just plastic-on-plastic as I tried to remove the clip…), and then fly­ing across the floor. Keep in mind this isn’t exactly the biggest com­po­nent ever:

Yeah. I crawled around for a while after that.

I’m kind of hop­ing that it’s just a capac­i­tor for the AGP port, because I can live with­out that being there, but I’d rather not plug in the moth­er­board and power up to find out it’s some­thing else… so as soon as I can hunt down an iron which will do SMD sol­der­ing ade­quately (tak­ing into account my pretty aver­age motor skills with such things), I’ll try and bung that one back onto the board and use it all hap­pily again. Alter­na­tively, if any­one feels like vol­un­teer­ing their SMD sol­der­ing skills, you’re more than wel­come to do it for me!