[Sorry about the size of these images, wordpress claims to creat thumbnails for me but I have seen no evidence of this]

My PC has been freezing on me, mouse-pointer and everything. It started in the excruciatingly hot weather but continued after that intermittently.

I took the lid off and had a look, and 9 capacitors had popped their lids and oozed brown corrosive-looking goo.

I got all the caps off and got three replacements out of the junkpile. I soldered two of them on, but got stuck on the third. So I tried clamping the board to get at it at a better angle. I heard a soft ceramic crunching sound, so I undid the clamp… only I turned the handle the wrong way and tightened the clamp :-( So I now have a mobo with 2 replacement capacitors, 7 missing capacitors, and a crushed mystery surface-mount component. At that point I decided my computer needed an upgrade!