Redundant capacitors

03 Aug 2005

I wrote some months ago about my adventures with cleaning and rendering useless a motherboard that I’d found on the side of the road, in which I accidentally removed a surface-mounted capacitor from the surface it was mounted on (duh).

It appears that capacitor did absolutely nothing.

Earlier this afternoon, I played with a bunch of hardware trying to find some stuff that worked for Marcelo, before establishing that the best of the bunch, the motherboard I’d broken (or ‘broken’) — it seemed to be really good quality in the whole time I was playing with it — was absolutely fine. After much changing and plugging and everything else that’s involved in building a computer from scraps, we wound up with the following specs:

• Pentium 3 866
• Gigabyte 6VXC7-4X-P motherboard
• 384MB of RAM
• 16MB Voodoo3 (2000, I’m pretty sure… it had TV-out, too — as in the socket was there and soldered on — but the blanking plate covered it… go figure. Didn’t have time to pull it apart/an S-Video cable to test.) AGP
• Two hard drives… a 10GB (his original) and a 13GB (added)

And it all seems to work without any problems, despite missing that 400^th capacitor lost one fateful day ;) Ah, I love technology when it just works even when it shouldn’t!