Hey all,
Recently we have had about 5-7 Dell optiplex GX 230's(or was it 250 i forget and who really cares) die just over 1-2 years old and i have also been reading about a large number of cases like it on here about similar issues with Dells. However with the ones here that have gone they all seem to have the same order of things happening just before they go.
1. The capacitors inside begin to flex and buldge.
2. The CPU slowly starts to overheat and spike
3. CPU aventually starts to slow down
4. Computer decides it doesnt want to boot anymore.
I pretty much think that this is Dell and just plain crappy engineering with cases that dont allow any airflow, rumors of using second hand parts (this makes sense as in all the exact same models the heatsinks are all different and different brand 40gb HDD) but well it kind of sucks to just throw a computer away after only 1-2 years use.
However their may be a way to get at least some use out of these Dells and below is an email sent to me by one of the staff members who asked if he could have one of the more recent to die Dell computers and hopefully it will help you squeeze a litte bit more life out of your Dells or even if your really smart be able to work out an even better way to fix them and let us all know how.
The leaking capacitor on the Dell is in the BIOS battery system, After installing Windows XP home and a bit more ram, removed BISO battery so it would do a fresh start restarted, system booted and ran fine after having a big fit as it had to rebuild the BISO database, a few restarts as windows likes to do when instilling new hardware all went fine..
Left the thing powered down for a few hours, and on restart it was then back to being a pretty door stop, a house brick would boot faster. After much fussing around got the thing to restart, and put it into self test mode only to have it report that the BIOS battery voltage is low.
Meter across the battery shows a nice 3V, nothing wrong there, so removed BIOS battery, system boots fine but a bit slow as it has to re find it self on boot.
So left battery out and cycled the thing through a few boots over a variable time frame, making sure that the 240v supply was removed form the power supply, it seems happy with the only down fall being it has to detect the memory and hard drive with each boot,
Going to play with it more to see what happens but might have found an easy fix by just leaving out the battery, its no good for any data applications as it looses it system time and date on each shut down and as hard as I try can not get into on restart to take its time setting form my server on booting (this might be a function in XP pro only, installed XP home).
Going to push my luck and going to see if I can get it take an 3d graphics card might be suitable to play games on for the kids.
Anyway hope this helps those people feel at least a little bit better about their crappy dells and make it so they will be able to get a bit more life out of it.