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Originally Posted by SteveDallas
Having said that... will somebody explain to me how bulging capacitors would cause the problem described? I admit, I know nothing about such things ... but it seems like bad capacitors wouldn't even get the system as far as booting.
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Imagine water flowing. It has ripples and haystacks, floods and droughts, etc. So what happens where the river ends? You get variation downstream. Computers don't like variation in their electricity stream flow. So computers have a reservoir usually just upstream. Sometimes the upriver streams flow major into the reservoir. Sometimes upriver streams are hardly running at all. But the reservoir maintains a constant flow farther downstream.
That is what a capacitor does. It’s a big electric reservoir. However when a capacitor is bulging, its 'reservoir' abilities are diminished. Eventually, the capacitor fails - the reservoir no longer exists.
Meanwhile, the computer is forgiving up to a point. It will work mostly when the electric stream varies somewhat. As that reservoir (capacitor) gets worse, and as the electricity downstream tends to ebb and flow, then the computer eventually hiccups on one of those ebbs or flows. We call that one hiccup a system crash.
There were many reasons for capacitor problems. One most published reason was a bad batch due to defective coating materials. Another was war in Africa where mines for tantalum were interrupted - forcing manufacturers to use other, less effficient types of capacitors. All of which is now irrelevant because the capacitors now must be replaced - at the component level or at the board level.