jesolo wrote:How can you tell if a capacitor is blown? What must I look out for?
I have a sound card that is not working (refer this post - Aztech Sound Galaxy Waverider 32+ not working)
The DOS utilities aren't picking up the card and I'm fearing that somewhere, something has blown. I'm new to this but, I'm hoping it might be a capacitor as it seems relatively easy to replace?
To reply to your question on my Pentium topic and to keep my topic clean, I'll answer you here!!
There are some pictures around Google that show blow caps and the way they usually look, but in old hardware they can only have "dried" and loose their capacitance and never look like a blown cap, because they are not blown, just dry, and that means they reached the end of their lives!
There are some capacitive checkers and there are some multimeters that have the capability of checking capacitance on a circuit, and tomorrow I'll post a picture of the one I use on my job, that is excellent!
The only drawback is that the capacitor need to be out of the circuit in order to make a good readout, and if you went that route (of removing the caps to test them) and don't just replace them right away, (joking mode ON) you are a cheap ass because all the capacitors on that sound card should cost less than a menu on McDonald's !!!!!! (joking mode OFF)
The hot components on the card are the Amplifier components and they should be hot, not sure if they should always be hot, but they at least should be when reproducing sound!
Hope this helps