I would normally agree with this reasoning and I highly value my time
-- never enough of it and I'd rather use it for paying work or leisure,
but... 

To swap motherboards usually means an OS re-install (at least if you
want reliable operation). While an OS re-install is generally easy and
not too time consuming, most of my systems take at least 2-3 DAYS to
re-install all of the applications. I haven't done an OS re-install on
any of my systems in a couple years. It simply takes too much time. 

I'm always amazed at how many people do an OS re-install at the first
glitch in their system. They must not have any significant applications
that need to be re-installed. 

On the other hand, I can swap all the caps on a motherboard in about an
hour, including removing the motherboard and re-installing it. I do
have a Hakko vacuum desoldering tool which makes short work of removing
the bad caps and that does make a big difference.

Matt Pobursky
Maximum Performance Systems

On Thu, 27 Oct 2005 11:14:04 -0400, M. Adam Davis wrote:
> On 10/26/05, Mike Hord <mike.hord@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > Interesting.  How do you decide which cap needs replacing?  Or do
> > you simply replace all the caps around the sockets in question?
> >
> When the board is so bad that it no longer boots, usually every
> largish capacitor around the CPU is either bulging or leaking.  I
> replace all of the (usually) three values of capacitors, because it's
> just a short matter of time before the others go even if they look
> nice now.  Sometimes I've removed "nice" looking ones and found they
> were visibly damaged on the bottom where I couldn't check.
>
> It's not really worth the trouble, though.  The caps are cheap, but 
> so are new motherboards and time is not necessarily free.

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