Once I got home from work I headed right into my capacitor transplant operation. The first thing I did was locate the capacitors on the GX260 board that I wanted to use. I decided to start there since I never actually tried removing or replacing capacitors on a motherboard before and since this board was going to be garbage one way or another when I was finished, I felt it was best to get some practice in first :)
The 6.3v 2200μF capacitors on the FX260 were not the same Rubycons on the 745, but they were all I had to to work with. the 1800μF were the same, however. I only have a 35W soldering iron at home, so it took a while to heat up each of the joints enough to pull the leads out…I had to go back-and-forth between positive and negative leads, “wiggling” them loose, since I wanted to be careful and not pull the lead from the capacitor or damage them in any way. I performed the same on the bad caps that were on the 745 to remove them. Removing the six capacitors from both boards took a little over an hour.
Luckily, removing the capacitors in that manner left the solder intact, so I sort of did the reverse to put the good caps back on the board. I simply heated it back up, gently pressing the capacitor lead against the hole until it was soft enough to press through. Once I had all capacitors in place, I performed some minor adjustments and “cleaned up” my joints a bit. I then took an Exacto knife and gently scraped away any stray solder – careful not to scratch the board or any adjacent traces.
I was anxious to try this out, but unfortunately I did not bring the PSU for the system home, so I had to wait until I got to work – today! First thing this morning I had my tech go get the PSU as I mounted it all back in the case to get it ready for testing. I grabbed a single PC2-4200 memory module and hooked up the PSU. I was discouragingly met with some warning beeps and no POST. I tried wiggling the replaced caps a bit, but no still no luck. I then decided to try a different memory module since I know these Dells can be a bit finicky and that did the trick! It booted right up…no fire or smoke either :)
I plan on using this as a replacement HTPC in my son’s room. The GX280 that’s in there now works OK, but this one will do much better. The GX280 will probably become a spare.
I also received my in-wall/ceiling speakers from MonoPrice. All I can say is that they are much larger than I expected. However, they also appear to be very high quality. They were surprisingly heavy, so I know they have decent-sized magnets in them. The mounting mechanism looks very good and I was just impressed overall by how well they appeared to be put together. I didn’t get a chance to try them out yet, but I hook them up for a quick test this evening…just to make sure they’re not defective. I won’t get a chance to install these until the week of the 26th (wife and kids will be out of town). Be sure to check back as I finish up my bedroom project!
Update:
Unfortunately, this little operation ended up being a failure in the end. I tried doing a lateral hard drive transfer with a Windows 7 load already on it from a system with a close enough chipset and all I got were several reboots during startup. So, I decided to try a fresh install and was met with either reboots or blue screens before I ever got to the initial language selection screen. Disappointing…I had high hopes to use that as a new HTPC. Oh well…
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