Good afternoon everyone. Long time lurker, and first time poster, absolutely love the retro/vintage PC scene, and always on the look out for that special something on the classifieds.

Anyway, this concerns the infamous Capacitor Plague.

I recently scored an OEM (Tiny branded) desktop - MS6156 ver 1.0 bx7 mobo (unfortunately it has the AMI bios, not Award, but you can't have everything I suppose) with a Slot 1 Pentium II 400Mhz, and I've upgraded with 320Mb RAM, 20GB SATA HDD via SATA/IDE converter, a Leadtech MX440 64GB (64bit ugh) GPU, ES1373 sound (useless for DOS is looks like, but not too bothered!) and fresh copy of W98SE. It doesn't look like it was booted/used since at least 2004.

I'm very happy with this build, really enjoying it, and using it a lot, but on closer inspection is capped with Chhsi capacitors - on the bad capacitor list. None of them are bulging, venting, look in pristine condition (so far). I've checked the PSU that I took from a old socket 478 build, it works fine, is clean, no bulging caps, no issues with booting, BSODs or anything at all really.

My questions are: Is it highly likely I'll have bulging/venting caps within say, the next year? Is it inevitable? I'm useless with a soldering iron, may see if there's a UK service who will change them for me, but anything I can do to reduce the risk? The PC runs cool, but would it be worth changing the PSU to a newer one? Would that in someway increase the longevity of the caps?

Thanks 😀