voltage reg. Question

[Ingo Debus]

David Halliday (Volt Computer) wrote:
> There was a shorted tantalum cap on the main board and it caused the power
> supply to show the same symptoms you are seeing.
[...]
> My technique for isolating the bad cap was quick and dirty but effective - I
> used an Xacto knife to cut the power traces until there was no short across
> the power in.  Once I had the section of the circuit isolated, I started
> unsoldering one leg of each capacitor I found, checking and resoldering it
> until I found the bad one.

Sometimes you can see if a tantalum cap has gone bad: there's a tiny
silver ball on it, looks like a tiny splash of solder.

Ingo