@Mephistro
"I haven't purchased or advised to purchase any Lenovo kit since the infamous brouhaha with the bubbling capacitors in the nineties."
You what?! We're giving Lenovo a good bollocking for the things they do, but you managed to spoil the fun with just one sentence.
- Lenovo was entirely unheard of in the nineties.
- First capacitor plague started around 2000, low-esr.com had a good article about it in 2002. Basically, a good half of the Taiwanese cap production was rubbish because of badly copied chemical composition. Fascinating story, actually, if anyone can be arsed to look it up.
- Second wave was a Chinese production in late 2000's. This time it included a lot of "mislabeled" caps (like having a 16uF cap in a bigger 47uF barrel), and counterfeits of the reputable names like Sanyo. Besides the usual noname business.
- In both waves, affected caps ended up pretty much everywhere. In PSU's, monitors, motherboards, etc, all over the world.
Well, besides these two major plague-like events, there have been lesser screw-ups every now and then. These are not so remarkable. It's quite easy to kill an electrolyte capacitor, if you don't leave a sufficient safety margin for it.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
