I picked up one of the PCChips "BookPC" systems very cheaply "untested" on eBay. It was absolutely filthy, but turns out that while the PSU is dead, the motherboard only needed a new coin cell and contact cleaner on the DIMM slot. With a normal PSU lashed up to the proprietary pin-out it boots nicely! It's got a Celeron 400Mhz with just 32Mb SDRAM. I'm hoping to make a nice dedicated tiny DOS / Win3.11 system with it.
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But the micro sized PSU seems totally unique to these systems, so perhaps worth trying to fix?
There is no life at all when powered on with green pin shorted, and the purple standby wire tests as short to ground. The brown goop has gone crusty, but it definitely isn't conductive.
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I've cleaned it up and inspected carefully. There seem to be three components visibly failed: 1000uf 10v and 1000uf 16v capacitors towards the output side of the board (the latter totally popped and had actually desoldered itself!). And towards the input side a resistor that looks like a high wattage 120R. There was a clear burn mark on the casing under a PCB cutout near this, and I initially suspected the big white mains capacitor or the transistor, but close up neither have any sign of damage. The resistor is crumbly at one end and has extremely high resistance.
Is it worth just replacing these components? Or are they likely to have failed because of some other issues?