Component Level Motherboard Repair (Not replacement)

Oh man! Ad-blocking software has been detected! :'(

This website is run by the community, for the community... and it needs advertisements in order to keep running. Blocking our ads means your killing our stats!
Please disable your ad-block, or become a premium member to hide all advertisements and this notice.

I've been fixing computers for a while and more and more recently, I've been seeing ads from people claiming to do component level motherboard repair and not just DC jacks.
This is something I really want to learn about because sometimes a replacement motherboard is rare or too expensive to fix. Some questions I have:


1) How do you diagnose the exact component failure?
Obviously, a burn mark is a dead give away, but what if there are no visual signs? Do you poke around with a multi-meter? With what voltage settings and how do you know what to look for?

2) Is it usually a bad capacitor?
badcaps seems to think so. What about a bad connection?

3) How do you perform the component level repair?
So you've found the bad capacitor or component, can you really solder a new one on without hurting the components around them?

Thanks
Andrei

 

Leaking caps are good ones to start out with, easy to spot and you dont need a steady hand to swap them out. A book such as Starting Electronics: Amazon.co.uk: Keith Brindley: Books may help along the way.

A multimeter is a must as well as you can check the tracks to make sure voltage is being passed from one end to another. The most common fault I used to fix though was leaky capacitors Capacitor plague - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia or stuff that was obviously broken as you say burn marks. However things bits that are visually defective are not always the defective part as something a bit further back may be pushing to much to little voltage making sonething else fry.

TBH its been a few years since I did any real electronics and these days if its not faulty caps you will probably spend more money in man hours repairing a board than you would do buying a new one.