My dad's computer was being incredibly weird. I thought "oh, definitely RAM" but memtest86 ran fine on every stick. Then I thought it was the motherboard, but when I was looking trying to find the CMOS reset jumper, I noticed that 8 of the capacitors were bulging and oozing orange "capacitor snot." They were 6.3v caps, so I assume the PSUs 5v rail went nuts (it's a cheapie stock PSU, so unsurprising). I made a video about my little adventure into motherboard repair. Let me know what y'all think!
BTW: I know the camera work sucks, and I know the audio was mediocre. I'm working on getting some better equipment to fix that. But as far as layout, content, my explaining, etc. what do you think I could do better? I'm editing in HitFilm 4 Express, so not quite as good as Adobe CC but it's not Windows Movie Maker either.
Great job! I have an MCP61-S motherboard as well, with a green, orange and yellow color scheme, lol. It still works but I sold the CPU when I built a new PC. It's an Emaxx board and it's almost 9 years old now.
There's normally a little cheap NVIDIA (I think like a GT 610 or something) in there. He's only doing Chrome and MS Office and some occasional media viewing (like ripping CDs to my NAS, easy stuff, nothing compute-heavy), so he doesn't really need anything fancy. Currently trying to talk him into a RAM upgrade, though.
I plan on maybe recycling everything except the 5v rail as a bench PSU. I've got a variable power supply circuit that I'm using with a cheap 12v wall wart, so I can give myself more amperage on that by using the 12v rail from this PSU. As long as it's not ultra-sensitive expensive stuff I don't really mind trusting it, so stuff like Arduino and basic breadboard stuff is fine, but I definitely will not be putting it back in a computer.
I love old computer stuff that just works. My dad had an IBM Aptiva machine with a 500MHz AMD K6-2, 128mb of RAM, and a 13.5GB hard drive, with Windows 98. The case was that iconic IBM beige color, and it had a 100w power supply. I am still using the case AND the power supply for my ITX router. Closing in on 20 year old PSU, and never had any problems with it. I wouldn't trust it with expensive stuff, but this is an ancient 1.2GHz embedded ITX board, so it's worth like $80 if it dies, which is less than the cost of a new PSU and a case.
The caps on older motherboards went bad regardless of the psu used, I have a A8NSLI Deluxe that I had to replace all of the 6.3v 1500uf caps on. I have also replaced caps in an Aopen monitor and various devices. As the story goes the formula was stolen for making capactors but they missed the stabilizer for the electrolytic compound thus were prone to failure.