Hushed-Up Disaster Dept.: If you've been paying attention to online forums, you've discovered a scandal that few companies are talking about. The only major media coverage has been in the Toronto Star. And it's a weird story.
Apparently because of industrial espionage—the facts are murky—a defective formulation for capacitor electrolyte, possibly stolen from a Japanese capacitor maker, was used over the past year or two to manufacture millions of cheap capacitors, mostly by Taiwan-based component makers. The flawed electrolyte forms hydrogen, then the capacitors leak, bulge, or pop like firecrackers. These caps are now blowing up motherboards left and right.
Only Abit Computer Corp. and IBM have had the guts to admit the problem. No computer vendor is immune to this situation as far as I can tell, but most are playing dumb, threatening to sue if their names are mentioned or hiding behind NDAs. They are hoping the problem will blow over.
Tech-repair firms like to tell people that this problem is caused by power surges—blaming the victim. Do a Google search on bad capacitor electrolyte or a similar combination of terms to see what is going on. It seems these bad caps are also found in some camcorders, VCRs, and other electronic gear. When they fail, the entire board fails. There is evidence that the first batch of bad capacitors appeared in 2001, and one repair person in Utah says he's replaced
40,000 bad caps already. Geez.
What I haven't seen fully discussed is that many of these capacitors may have found their way into aircraft electronics. I hope that some reader with influence will get the message to the right people. This is a disaster waiting to happen on a lot of fronts. Can you say "fly-by-wire"?
PC Magazine