This should be a short note. I just had to mention something about a motherboard that blew up on me a few weeks ago and what a busy day yesterday was.

When motherboards go bad

Blown capacitors on the MSI 6330 motherboaard

Quite some time ago, I made the move from an AMD K6-2 500-based system as my primary computer workstation to a Athlon (Thunderbird) 800Mhz system. I built the system myself using parts I bought from Posh Electronics including a Microstar model 6330 motherboard.

This motherboard ran very well for quite a long time. It had no problems at all. Then, one day, the screen went blank and after I power-cycled the system, it would not boot.

I was on my way out when this happened, so I turned the power off and didn't do anything about it until later that day. When I returned and turned the power on again, it booted fine and ran fine. The system continued to run fine for two more days until the screen went blank again while I was doing some work. This time, I had no luck getting the system to run again - even after letting it sit for some time like I did before.

I took the system into Mike at Posh and he looked at it. It didn't take him long to figure out what had happened. The tall capacitors near the CPU socket had blown their tops. Mike had never heard of this kind of thing happening before to these boards - and he sells a lot of them. However, he received a call that morning from someone else who had the same model motherboard and the same thing had happened to them.

Mike was gracious enough to help me swap the motherboard out for a Microstar DDR board (model 6380) which has been running fine since then.

Yesterday, while at Posh Electronics, I saw my old board sitting on a shelf and decided to take a few pictures of the blown capacitors. So there you go.

Megaproductive Thursday

Yesterday was quite a day.

I got up at 7:20 and was on the road to Salt Lake City by 8:00. Sardine Canyon was blanketed in a dense fog which severely hampered visibility. Driving conditions between Brigham City and Farmington were terrible as large snowflakes fell. Finally, when I reached Centerville, the snow let up and the skies started to clear up some.

I made it to the Audiology Associates office in Holladay at 9:30. They had a semi-urgent problem with one of their computers and had asked that I come down as soon as possible and resolve their problem. It took me about seven minutes to fix their problem and then I was finished.

While I was in town, I ran over to Granger Medical Plaza and installed an uninterruptible power supply (UPS) for audiologist John Pater who had lost some patient data during the harsh weather earlier this week that left over 100,000 Utah residents without power for up to two days.

Shortly before 11:00, I stopped and visited briefly with my brother and my dad at Barton's Builders.

Then, I was headed back to Logan. I stopped at Arby's in Farr West for a bite to eat.

After stopping at home to check e-mail, I went to Posh Electronics to deliver their new website. Mike didn't ask for much... he just wanted something better than an excel spreadsheet so he could make a price list available to his corporate clients.

After meeting with Mike at Posh, I went to TerraStar Internnational to collect some service agreement forms and to get some photos of a product they have asked me to do some web pages for.

After that, I ran to Utah State University to check our mailbox.

Then, at 15:00, I met with the president and vice president of EK Ekcessories to deliver the second phase of the website overhaul project we're working on for them.

Shortly after 16:00, I met my mother at my house so she could visit with my daughters. I ordered some pizza from Pizza Plus in Hyrum, but they screwed up our order and the delivery was late. It's okay because they knocked ten bucks off the order.

After dinner, I ran to the credit union to deposit some checks.

Then... I was exhausted.

Whew.