Walked into an office in Portland and counted 14 broken monitors on one floor

Was doing a consult for a mid-size law firm last Tuesday and noticed a whole pile of Dell monitors stacked in a corner with bad capacitors - probably 2 years of failed hardware nobody bothered to fix. Has anyone here ever bulk-repaired those common capacitor failures instead of just replacing the whole unit?

3 comments

3 Comments

the_angela2mo ago

Friend tried re-capping a dozen Dells and only got three working again, the rest were toast.

king.stella2mo ago

That part about "only got three working again" really made me stop and think. I used to be all about trying to fix everything, like I'd get a weird sense of pride from re-capping monitors even if it took hours. But after reading stories like this and trying it myself a couple times, I totally changed my mind. It's just not worth the headache when you factor in your time and the chance of them failing again a few months later. Better to just chunk the bad ones and move on with your life.

mary7761mo ago

I tried re-capping a stack of six Dells from a client once and ended up with two working, one that caught fire, and three that just sat there looking smug. My soldering iron has more scars than my knees from shingling. At this point I figure if I can't fix it in ten minutes with some electrical tape and a prayer, into the e-waste pile it goes. Maybe I'm just bad at it, but my success rate is so low that buying a new monitor feels like a bargain compared to what my time is worth.