So, for the past week, I've been troubleshooting this IBM PC 5150 16-64K system that I'm working on.

Since then, I have replaced every capacitor on the motherboard (all 17 of them), all of them on the floppy controller, and all of them on the CGA video card. And when I went to power on the system, it showed an odd thing on the screen, but when I power cycled, nothing. It turned out I reversed the one capacitor for the -5VDC line and after I replaced it with a new cap with the polarity correctly this time, I heard a continous beep/tone and I've already removed all of the RAM on bank 0 since they looked nasty and the ones for banks 1-3 were also bad, but it was only two or three chips of the 27 for those banks. I then installed sockets for bank 0 RAM so it will be easier to replace those chips if they should fail again, plus, I installed a socket for the Intel P8284A clock generator chip since those can fail at any time.

Another thing I did was order NOS RAM (75 of them), 3 EPROMs that'll work with the system according to MZD (minus zero degrees) for making a diagnostics ROM, a GLaBIOS ROM, and have the other as a spare for something else, a couple of P8284A chips - Intel and NEC (I checked and that'll work with the system), and spare sockets for the ROMs in case I need to replace them. I also have an NEC V20 8088 CPU that'll be used in the system once I get everything situated and once I determine the full issue with the continous beep/tone.

Here are the board, video card, and floppy controller with the old caps next to them.

My other plan is to buy some 40-pin sockets and an Intel 8255 in case the sockets for the CPU and FPU go bad and if the 8255 goes out, I can install a socket and install the new one without having to use the soldering iron every time.

Pretty much making it more serviceable and less stressful.