More on the great capacitor scandal -- Nichicon

MacInTouch Home Page

Macintouch has been tracking capacitor and motherboard failures on Apple's G5 machines. Now they expanded to reporting on Dell issues. Macintuch really does journalism. They use their readers as reporters and deploy their own editors and investigators. An interesting and underappreciated model!

Ron Royer reports that the current rash of iMac G5 failures may be caused by a bad batch of Nichicon capacitors that is also causing Dell computers to fail:

I don't know if you have seen this, but other manufacturers seem to have this issue too... Postings from Badcaps.net:

"I work as a network engineer/administrator at a company in Washington DC, with about 600 installed workstations. As many as 200-300 of those are the GX270 models, which are 2.4-2.8GHz P4 machines.

We've had a rash of motherboard failures on these machines. I only recently had a chance to inspect a dead board before it was returned to Dell, and it turned out to have swollen Nichicon caps.

I finally had a Dell tech admit that they were aware of the problem and were replacing boards under warranty (the corporate machines usually have 3-year extended service plans). As of today we have 7 new boards on the way to us and at least 15-20 more have already failed. (I'm pretty sure that the GX270 boards are OEM-built by MSI.)

I'm just posting this for information, and to see if anyone else has seen this in a large-scale IT operation, especially with Dells."

"Well, we did 12 boards today, and we have 6 more to call in. I spot-checked some of the bad caps, and they all seem to be Nichicons with the same lot numbers and about the same date range (early 2003). All the replacement boards that were installed had Rubycon caps instead.

I did notice a few boards where, while the caps looked identical, not all of them were bulging. There is a picture of this here: [Dell Motherboard Capacitor Failures]

I'm starting to agree with the idea that this is Nichicon's own quality control problem, rather than the same batch of bum electrolyte as last time. I also think that the lousy ventilation inside the Dell small-form-factor case speeds up the failures, since they don't like to waste money on things like fans."

The G5 interiors run hot -- as do small-form-factor Dells. I think the Mac Mini is quite a bit cooler. This problem may be a combination of high temperatures and manufacturing problems. Are computer manufacturers running at temperatures that exceed manufacturing specs for their components?

I also wonder if setting the iMac to 'full performance' mode might accelerate this problem.

Login Delays and Damaged Font Caches on Mac OS X 10.3

Daring Fireball: Login Delays and Damaged Font Caches on Mac OS X 10.3

One of the great weaknesses in OS X is the propensity to "corruption" of caches, preferences and other items. I makes me wonder how strong the unix underpinnings of OS X really are.

I've been experiencing login delays, so I'll check this out. I'll also see if Panther Cache Cleaner or its ilk deal with this. (ONYX has been having bugs recently.)

Apple recommends monthly full charge and discharge cycle for LiON battery products

Apple - Batteries

Both iPod and laptop:

Exercise Your Machine

Lithium-ion batteries need to be used for maximum performance. If you don’t use your device often, be sure to complete a charge cycle at least once per month.

ChronoSync for backup

Econ Technologies, Inc.: "ChronoSync also makes an excellent, lightweight file backup utility, making it easy to keep duplicate working copies of your precious files. Using the scheduling capabilities, you can devise quite sophisticated backup strategies. Hourly, daily, and weekly synchronizations can be scheduled to make sure that, at any instant, you have a working copy that you can revert to for any reason. Backup to external storage devices or other computers including Mac OS 9, Windows, Linux, or any operating system Mac OS X can mount to."

- supplement to Retrospect, backup user folders to mounted image over network

One person's view of digital camcorders

Using the Sony TRV900

This page represents my collected knowledge about the TRV900, some other cameras, the latest models, and digital video in general.

I love this type of page. One person's view based on their own experience. The TRV900 is a legend, the lessons here are generalizeable.

SimplyDV: Canopus ADVC-100 Analogue to Digital Video Converter

SimplyDV: Canopus ADVC-100 Analogue to Digital Video Converter

A well regarded A/D converter. An alternative to replacing my Hi8 with a digital camera.

Another Hint on merging iPhoto Libraries

macosxhints - Merge old iPhoto libraries on CD with iPhoto 5 libraries

If you drag and drop an iPhoto library to a CD, the 'magic XML' file isn't created and iPhoto won't recognize the archived library for importing.

This hint discusses several workarounds, and also digresses into problems with copying OS X symlinks from CD. A finder copy may not handle the symlinks, which are relative symlinks, correctly. Using ditto or archive seems to do the trick.

Good discussion, even if it illustrates the problems with iPhoto. It would help if there was some documentation.