capacitors Archives

Are 80plus power supplies worth it?

Dave Farquhar Hardware January 4, 2013May 18, 2022capacitor, capacitors, cheap stuff, corsair, ocz, power savings, seasonic, tolerances

Are 80plus power supplies worth it? Extremetech just that question recently. Based on their conclusion, not usually, at least not solely for power savings. But it’s an easy way to get a box built to stricter tolerances with higher-quality electronics. Read more

Dave Farquhar

David Farquhar is a computer security professional, entrepreneur, and author. He has written professionally about computers since 1991, so he was writing about retro computers when they were still new. He has been working in IT professionally since 1994 and has specialized in vulnerability management since 2013. He holds Security+ and CISSP certifications. Today he blogs five times a week, mostly about retro computers and retro gaming covering the time period from 1975 to 2000.

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Model railroading with your Droid: Solving electrical issues

Dave Farquhar Android, model railroading, Toy trains December 29, 2012January 5, 20131990s, android, capacitor, capacitors, resistors, voltage regulator

Electrodroid is an Android app designed for electronics hobbyists, but it has uses for model railroaders too. Its LED calculator is invaluable when using LEDs to light buildings, cars, locomotive cabs or headlights, or for other projects. Knowing the input voltage, you can then determine what resistors to use to protect the LED.

The voltage drop calculator is useful too, if less obvious. Read more

Dave Farquhar

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The trouble with Dell

Dave Farquhar Hardware December 6, 2012January 8, 2025acer, apple, capacitor, capacitors, dell, Dell Inspiron, hp, IBM, intel, Packard Bell, pennies on the dollar

Note: I wrote this in mid-2010 and, for whatever reason, never posted it. I found it this week. Although the information in it is no longer fresh and new, it’s still useful, so for that reason, I’m posting it now.

Dell is standing on some shaky ground right now. Bill Snyder has a good summary of the problem.

In recent years, Dell computers have, shall I say, made me nervous. Some of it’s been concrete. Some of it’s just been touchy-feely. Now one of those touchy-feely problems is more concrete. Read more

Dave Farquhar

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Entry-level troubleshooting

Dave Farquhar Hardware June 15, 2012November 3, 2025antivirus, Ars Technica, capacitors, dell, hp, IBM, power button, troubleshooting

Ars Technica offers a very good, brief guide to troubleshooting computer hardware. Being two pages long, it doesn’t tell you everything, but includes some good tricks, including one I don’t always remember to tell people. To fully discharge a device, unplug it from the wall, remove the battery if it has one, then press and hold down the power button for 10-15 seconds. This discharges any power that could be lingering in the capacitors inside. Read more

Dave Farquhar

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Replacing bad capacitors in failed electronics

Dave Farquhar Saving money May 20, 2012January 8, 2025capacitor, capacitors, panasonic

If you’ve had a piece of electronic gear fail in the last few years, there’s a good chance it’s due to one or more bad capacitors inside. The problem most infamously reared its ugly head on motherboards produced just after the turn of the century, but that’s just a place where it’s highly visible. If you had a DTV converter box, a DVD player, or some other device fail in the same timeframe, it may have had the same problem.

If I had a failed motherboard, I’d probably just swap the motherboard unless it’s vintage or otherwise collectible. I’m more inclined to fix an LCD monitor or a DTV converter box. Read more

Dave Farquhar

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Smart card problems and other Monday weirdness

Dave Farquhar Hardware November 29, 2011November 28, 2011capacitors, hp

My boss’ computer had a bad case of the Mondays this week. It took forever to come out of power saving mode, and then when it finally did, it was mostly unresponsive. He couldn’t log in, and the system didn’t even recognize his smartcard reader. The usual fix for a smartcard reader that won’t read and whose light doesn’t blink or come on is to unplug the card reader, wait a few seconds or a minute, and plug it back in, but even that didn’t help this time. Nor did plugging in a known-working reader.

The machine did respond to ctrl-alt-del, and the shutdown options weren’t disabled. Fortunately. So I did a full shutdown, which it did, under protest.
Read more

Dave Farquhar

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Don’t use gadget buyback programs

Dave Farquhar Saving money May 13, 2011April 15, 2017capacitors, dell, Dell Inspiron, nvidia, spyware

MSNBC consumer reporter Bob Sullivan does a thorough analysis of how gadget buy-back programs work, and why you shouldn’t use them.

There’s no need for me to rehash everything that’s wrong with them, because Bob covered all those bases admirably. I’ll just run through his hypothetical scenario and tell you what you should do instead.
Read more

Dave Farquhar

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Thrift-store PCs

Dave Farquhar Hardware, Saving money December 22, 2010October 11, 20191990s, capacitors, dell, estate sales, garage sale, garage sales, IBM, lionel, memory slots, micro atx, recycling, usb port, Windows XP

In the comments of a recent post I did, reader Glaurung Quena brought up a good topic: secondhand PCs, acquired cheaply, strictly as rebuild fodder.

I like the idea, of course, because I’ve been doing it for years. In the 1990s I built a lot of 486s and Pentiums into former IBM PC/ATs, basically until all the board makers relocated the memory slots into a position that wasn’t clear on the original PC/AT due to a beam that supported its drive bays. And of course the adoption of ATX and MicroATX killed that, at least for a while.

But now ATX has been around as long as the old AT architecture had been when ATX came along, and efforts to replace ATX haven’t been successful. So that trick makes more sense again. Buy a secondhand machine cheaply, intending to re-use the case, and regard anything else inside that happens to be reusable strictly as a bonus. Read more

Dave Farquhar

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What to look for in a router

Dave Farquhar DD-WRT, Hardware, Servers and Networking October 4, 2010August 3, 20181990s, antenna, asus, capacitors, cisco, d-link, dd wrt, dealextreme, India, linksys, lowercase letters, netgear, networking equipment, radio shack, tomato, wrt54g

I revisit the topic of what to look for in a router every six or seven years. As important as it always was, I think it’s even more important today, as there are a number of underpowered routers on the market and it’s best to avoid them.

This post originated in 2010. I revised it for 2017 needs, and by the time I was done, I’m not sure much of my 2010 text was left. But that’s OK.

Dave Farquhar

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