I got home the other day and found a terrible smell upstairs in the computer room. Unfortunately, I am familiar with the terrible smells that computers can make, based on my experiences with burning and damaging computer components.

I tracked the smell to my Linux storage server that also serves as my MythTV backend. In case you don’t know, this is the device that does all my TV recording (like a TiVo). Finding the source of the smell was only the first part, as I now had to figure out which of my components had gone bad.

Luckily, I know a good place to go for computer questions: Anandtech Forums. As soon as I posted my question, I started getting some answers.

The most intriguing response was about bad capacitors. Apparently, due to some industrial espionage, there are millions of bad capacitors floating around that have been incorporated into all sorts of electronics. You can get the full story at www.badcaps.net. They had some photos of what bad capacitors would look like, so I got out the digital camera and went hunting.

The results were a little surprising, and also a little disappointing. I’m always happy to track down the root problem of a computer crash, but when it’s the motherboard, that’s about as bad as it can get. This means that I need to find a new motherboard, gut the old machine, and transfer all the components over to the new motherboard. Considering my luck with hardware, this is a significant endeavor!

Anyways, have a look at some of the pictures I took of my leaking capacitors. You can see the brown corrosion spots on the tops where the fluid is leaking out.