After a great week in Mountain View with the rest of team I returned to find that not all was well.
When I tried to boot my trusty Dell Precision, nothing happened. Upon inspection, I found the video card had been pushed in and “bent”. I have been assured that no unauthorized vacuuming occurred during my absence, which leaves Miss Kitty as the likely suspect. I tried to re-seat the card to no avail. I think Miss Kitty actually did me a favor since I found a number of capacitors on the motherboard are bulging with “crap” coming out of their tops. I guess I am reaping what I sowed in my last post.
On Monday, I’ll try to find someone who might be able to replace the motherboard and possibly video card for a reasonable price but it looks like I’ll be needing a replacement for my personal computing soon.
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I’m wondering if you ever found anyone who could replace the motherboard on your DELL Precision 650?
No. I never did. Unfortunately Dell uses non-standard motherboards and it wasn’t possible to find a new one to fit in the chassis. That kind of soured me on Dell although I don’t know that any other vendor is any better.
It still sitting here waiting for me to either find someone who needs the parts or to take it in to be recycled. The 4G RAM and the power supplies would be useful to someone I would think. I need to get some old data off of the drives and wipe them but I don’t have a machine to plug them into. I’m not even sure if I can put them in a new machine since they were configured as “raid 0” ext3.
I think i need the power sups, but i’m to far away 🙂
I had the same problem, and I replaced all the caps made by that manufacturer (Nichon, was it?). The machine is still running fine.
If it’s a matter of fix or throw, and the machine has any value to you, you might try doing the resurrect. It’s not that difficult if you can hold a fine soldering iron.
You’ll need about a dozen of the big power caps, and you can be quite easy about the value as long as you choose greater or equal – the originals are 1,800uF 6.3V, and I replaced them with 2,200uF 16V. The main criterion is physical size.Mine were a little bigger and needed some creative cramming.
There are also two or three others by the same maker, and I assume they all have the killer exploding electrolyte so I replaced those as well. The machine worked with just the obviously sick cluster exchanged, though.
A hour’s work and you could have it running again.