New Members - please post your introductions here

[bgavin]

Re: New Members - please post your introductions here

Bruce Gavin

I'm in Orangevale CA, at the east end of Sacramento county.

I own Compudox Computer Services since 1993, after a long hardware engineering career at IBM. I do local and remote IT support for Windows and networks. I carry a Novell Master CNE and numerous other certs, and am fluent in five programming languages.

On the music side, I am classically trained in piano from age 6, and currently play electric bass, Hammond keys/synths, and 5-string banjo. Years ago, I used to play lead guitar, but lost interest. I am the authorized franchisee in Sacramento for Bill Fitzmaurice bass horns, and also design and build my own horns and boutique bass cabinets.

I've done industrial and wedding photography since 1968. Up until very recently, I shot client film entirely on Mamiya medium format gear. I like film quality better, but everybody wants digital, and it is less expensive to shoot. I use a Nikon D200 for digital stuff.

I found BadCaps while doing internet research on the capacitor issue. When I get proficient at recapping, I will offer my clients modded PSUs and boards for their business critical needs.

[tazwegion]

Re: New Members - please post your introductions here

Hmmmm... I've been here a while, but perhaps it's long overdue for me to introduce myself

Obviously tazwegion is a pseudonym, one of many actually (though that's not important), I'm old, really old... like mid 30's and have been around computers and dabbling in programming since the hey days of the VIC-20, completing an Advanced Certificate in Info Tech' during the late 80's.

I've really become a jack-of-all-trades and can understand where bushytails is coming from, I lean primarily towards hardware enthusiasm but I'm not much more than a noob with experience, same with my electronics background, a hobbyist with a basic highschool electronics grounding (excuse the pun)

I was referred to this site during a bad experience with a late MSI s370 platform and have lurked on & off for a while, eventually signing up when this aspect of my hobby came to the fore, primarily I recap for the challange but as I simply can't abide frivolous wastage (hence I recycle what I can), I repair PC's for family & friends alike, well that's my excuse for hording anyway!

I've found this site an excellent source of relevant research & practical material and thank all those responsible, I can only hope that in the future my meagre success can be of help to someone else

[Sparky]

Re: New Members - please post your introductions here

OK I'll post in here too since I'm new. I got my username as nickname from when I first started playing with electricity and caused a few spark showers The nickname has stuck. I love electricity and electronics, and am currently in college for electronic engineering technology.

I've already successfully recapped some mobos, but I certainly don't know everything, and my only supply of caps are from blown boards. Typically I replace bad caps with more of the same bad brand but hey at least it makes the boards work! Having no other supply that is just what I've been stuck doing. Also I didn't know much about ESR so one board I recapped were with some random caps from ebay with the right voltage and capacitance rating but they cause the system to boot really slow, I'm guessing they aren't low ESR caps.

I came here because my Antec PSU died (stupid fuhjyyu craps) and was seeking some advice as to what you guys thought I should do with it (recap, RMA, or both, then sell). Hopefully I'll learn more about all this stuff and maybe at some point I'll be able to give back some knowledge

[PeteS in CA]

Re: New Members - please post your introductions here

De Vry?

[Sparky]

Re: New Members - please post your introductions here

De Vry?

No, University of Akron

[Topcat]

Re: New Members - please post your introductions here

Welcome aboard.... My parents could always count on me to take something of their apart as a child.... Several times in school, we knocked the power out in the entire building..... Ohh the memories!

[308nato]

Re: New Members - please post your introductions here

Howdy!

Galvanized sent me. (Ducks in case that is not good)

Lot's of actual useful info around here, nice job!

[willawake]

Re: New Members - please post your introductions here

well if galvanized sent you then welcome indeed

[AKBessy]

Re: New Members - please post your introductions here

Hi. I am AKBessy from Alaska - born here and lived here all of my life. I am on the older side and have been married longer than some of the young kids have been alive. I don't know a whole lot about anything but do dabble a lot in everything. I have an AAS in Refrigeration and Heating Technology - that's where I got my introduction to electrical troubleshooting, which I am still not worth a shit at ;-). I was introduced to computers in 1998 when I purchased a Gateway 450 (don't remember the specs -top of the line back in the day) and have a blast with them. I am amazed at everything about them! I like to take on the challenge of trying to fix things myself from hardware- to software-related issues. I do have to ask hubby for help with the electrical troubleshooting - he's tone-deaf, but has a better understanding of the numbers he is looking at. My interests include computers, history, science, nature, camping, hunting, snowmachining and atving, traveling and HAWAII. Quit drinking back at the beginning of 2005 and quit smoking back in the middle of Aug. 2006; my remaining bad habits include drinking coffee in the morning, sleeping more than I should, spending more time than I should on forums and photo-editing.

[stevo1210]

Re: New Members - please post your introductions here

Well, I've been here for a very very long time now. So I guess that I am overdue in posting an introduction....

To start off with my real name is Stephen and I live in Sydney, Australia.
I am currently 15 and turning 16 years old in October 2007 and in grade 10 at the moment.
My username "stevo1210" comes from my nickname "Stevo" and my birthday "12 October [1210]" put together.

I started off with fiddling PCs when I was in primary school (in grade 5 I guess?). My first box was a 486DX/66MHz with 16MB of RAM and a 2GB Hard drive.... it costed my parents about $700AUD second hand in mid 1998.
I landed here at badcaps when my IBM Netvista had bad GSC caps.... only problem back then was that I couldn't find any replacement caps, so I ended up scrapping that box and building a new PC. Now, that I have my trusty solder iron and badcaps. I now recap motherboards for myself and my friends. I am also a fan of buying cheap motherboards with bad caps.... the fun part is when recapping them....

As my passion for the electronics side.... I was inspired by my father who was an electrician. Because I am the only one in the house that has knowledge of low power electronics and computers I am responsible for taking my parents electronic equipment apart and fixing them or if it's a computert type of thing (which it usually is).... I also have to be there to fix the problem.

I started fiddling with electronics when I was 9 years old. I started off with a "Fun with electronics kit" (which I still have). Now I am exploring electronics in higher end components, especially mobile phones and computer motherboards.

As for my education, I have no certificates for now as I haven't graduated yet. But I favour my subjects of Physics/Maths/Modern History and Information Software Technology.

I am hoping to be a computer or electronics engineer in the future times so I am usually studying now.... the only time I have for computers and electronics is the weekend or in the holidays.

Anyway, I hope that gives everyone an idea of who I am.

[willawake]

Re: New Members - please post your introductions here

holee shit you have the same birthday as me, you must be cool

thanks for the belated introduction

[Texkonc283]

Re: New Members - please post your introductions here

Im 26 and am fresh to the IT world.

My first PC was a 486DX2 66, Win3.11/Dos6.22!! WOOT WOOT. (I think that was the software, long time ago for me) At this point is where the fun began! I then got my dads old computer that was from a local computer shop a P100 i think. And that is when it all really started! I started tinkering with it and crashed it a few times. but is was Windows 95a.

I then built a K6-400 myself, didnt last long and got a 450 and put the 400 into another machine. After messing with these for a some time, my parents saw/heard me break the machine alot and then decided to have one built for me . I guess they wanted one that wouldn't break. So they had my friends dad build it of all people. His dad was a computer dork and retired AF. That machine didn't last long, it was a PII-450. Then somewhere in that time i built a K6-2 -400 or 450. After some time there i built a dual PII- 550. Then right before college I built a TBIRD 800. Ran that for most of college then did a few upgrades and more builds......yada yada yada.

I am now running a Athlon 64X2 5200+ with 4Gigs and XP x64.

I just got into the IT world. And DAMN! I was surprised that it was like 100% different then personal support for family and friends.

[willawake]

Re: New Members - please post your introductions here

welcome friend....enjoy your dell hell.......

I just got into the IT world. And DAMN! I was surprised that it was like 100% different then personal support for family and friends.

ummm you aint doing support for the entire family and friends of the company yet? if not i like to sign up!

[Spacedye69]

Re: New Members - please post your introductions here

...enjoy your dell hell.....

All too true!

[Texkonc283]

Re: New Members - please post your introductions here

All too true!

This has really only been my first bad one. The others were easy fixes. Viruses/spyware bad PSU, this was my first bad one. (knocks on wood)

[Tom41]

Re: New Members - please post your introductions here

I've been here a while as well, but just thought I'd post here to let you know how it all started...

I've been into computers for many years, right back from the days of the ZX Spectrum and BBC Micro, through the early PCs and games consoles, right up to today's modern powerhouse machines.

I also used to be into electronics when I was younger - I would frequently try to make circuits to be incorporated into bigger systems (amplifiers, LED indicators etc) and also enjoyed opening up electronic devices to see the components inside. I must say, I broke more equipment than I fixed though...

Up until recently, I worked at a factory - helping out with their computer systems and doing things like the daily backup and server maintenance. My first foray into the 'bad caps' phenomenon was when my work colleague brought in a dead PSU from his home computer. I didn't know about the capacitors back then, but I did see that one of the rubber-sheathed coils had elongated and was longer than my finger! I wish I'd taken a photo, since the cleaners threw it away the next day

Anyway, after researching PSU failures on Google, I came across the bad caps phenomenon and badcaps.net. Before long, I was opening up PCs all over the workplace (and at home) to see if the caps were good!

My first experience of proper 'bad caps' after I knew about it was on a work PC that was usually left on 24/7. It was doing random reboots and sometimes refused to connect to the network - so I opened it up, and found that every single (GSC) cap inside had vented! Not only that, the PSU fan had been dead a long time.

Oh, the things I could tell you about bad caps I've found, but this is just an intro so I'll stop here

[toddstidham1]

Re: New Members - please post your introductions here

Guess I'll introduce myself as well (joined a few weeks back but never got around to looking through all the other sections until now).
I started off in the early 80's with an Atari 1200xl (buggy computer though). I upgraded to a 130xe and had the memory doubled to 320k (oohhh...ahhhh) for a killer huge ramdisk (for an Atari anyway). I ran the Riverboat BBS (east coast Philadelphia area) off of it with 2 stock 1050 disk drives and 2 modified 1050's that did true double density. Those along with my HUGE ramdisk gave me just over 1meg of storage (more ohhh's and ahhh's). I customized FoReM BBS software to run as seperate modules that loaded each other from ramdisk (since the atari only had 64k useable memory, and FoReM was 63k in size, it didn't leave much room for customizing, by splitting the login, msg boards and download sections into seperate basic programs it let me do a lot of really cool ATASCII animated prompts and ASCII art things). It worked really well and since BBS's were all the rage back in the day I had a loyal and steady stream of callers (one dude called from Alaska!). I ran the BBS for about 3-4 years and my sysop handle was Huck Finn (I know, dorky...but hey, I was a kid AND a nerd/geek/dweeb). Once I started driving, my focus changed from computers to cars and I went into the automotive repair field after high school (in hind sight, this was a bad move financially as I would probably have been a bizzillionaire from the whole dot com craze had I stuck with computers...socially however it was easier picking up girls as a gear head so I guess it may balance out). Over the last few decades as cars became more computer equipped and I used more computerized devices to fix them, I found myself slowly migrating back into the field and now I do programming and databasing for Pocket PC's. So there's my history in a nutshell. Hello everyone!

[Mootsfox]

Re: New Members - please post your introductions here

Well... I've always enjoying messing with stuff, legos, etc, and I got into computers about three years ago with my first desktop. It was an AMD 3500+, ASUS A8N-SLI Deluxe, 512MB of RAM, 80GB SATA HDD, X300SE and a 400w Ultra PSU. Since then I've learned and upgraded, trying to stay near the bleeding edge, but always falling behind. Now I'm using a Quad core Q6600, running at 3.33GHz on an ASUS P5K-E Wifi board, 4GB of RAM (thinking about going to eight), an HD3870 which I swapped for an HD2900, two 250GB WD HDDs in RAID 0 and a 700w OCZ PSU. The only thing left since my first build is the DVD-RW drive.

Boring computer hardware talk aside, I recently got interested in building, or at least trying to build circuits. I've spent about $200 so far on parts and a few books. I know a little bit, but I'm still a noob in the field, but I want to learn more! I'm a freshman at OSU right now, going into engineering, but I still don't know what I want to do after college.

Yeah, thats a brief intro of me and my computer/electronics interest. In a couple weeks/months, I'll be asking a lot of questions about everything. Hi!

[christalnet]

Re: New Members - please post your introductions here

I am Chris Lemke, Little Rock, AR. USA 72113 I am new to the board and trying my hand at LCD monitor repair which is what led me to here. I have been a hardware technician for many years and thought I would like to learn more than just plugging in new cards when they burn. So thats it, I'm an Ebay power seller and as for no spam I won't post my user ID for ebay here but if I can help anyone here at bad caps I will give members cost on anything they post a need for as a matter of good will. ( and because I want to pick your brains )

Chris Lemke
LBS Enterprises LLC.
106 Rouen Ct.
Little Rock, Ar. 72113

[Joe Rampolla]

Re: New Members - please post your introductions here

Hi Folks,

I learned BASIC Plus back in 1977. It wasn't until about 1988 that I started to use an old Timex/Sinclair 1000 on CompuServe and the Fidonet BBS network. I then put the T/S 1000 to use with an I/O board (by Byte-back) to automate (in part) a toy train layout in the mid '90s. Still use the old Timex a little with the layout. That Z80 processor is a very useful chip, however I don't know what I will do when the old Timex gives up. I learned a lot from the guys on the model train section of Fidonet. In fact the capacitor flywheel concept was introduced to me on Fido. Now I have taken that simple application of a capacitor to its limit, the limit being its physical size since it needs to be contained within a locomotive or similar rail item.

As far as the modern PC is concerned, I have only gone so far are upgrading a CD drive to a CD burner. I did experiment once with making a long USB cable, which wasn't successful, but at least I didn't ruin my machine. Have repaired my scanner when the mechanism jammed, but the only difficult part of that was opening the case. I had some success refilling inkjet cartridges on the Lexmark Z11 and Z12.

I have very fond memories of using that old Timex/Sinclair despite how long it took to load a program from a cassette player. The little thermal printer was fun in its day. I did rewire a keyboard to replace the membrane keyboard on the old Timex, and hard-wired it to the Timex's board.

I few years ago I got Dr. Bruce Chubb's book on building your own interface. I used some of the programming ideas with the old Timex. Timex BASIC is a little different than most versions of BASIC. I did play around with the TI 99 4A a little back in the late 80s. I do miss the old Fido days!



Take care, Joe.