We recently inherrited this Shuttle Spacewalker Motherboard. The board's previous owner complained that the computer kept crashing intermittently, and this motherboard was diagnosed as the colpret. The board had a broken socket where the heatsink clip attached. Thinking this might be a problem with overheating due to this broken clip, we installed a copper slug using a piece of thin welding rod. The processor ran nice and cool, but the system would still crash when loading windows. We tried different power supplies, different RAM and different hard drives, and could not get a stable system. After a few Google attempts we came across Bad Caps.Net an excellent resource that described in detail our exact problem, and how to fix it. After reading through the FAQ's we found that we had at least four bad Capacitors on our board that would have to be changed. I can not over emphasize the difficulty involved here. The smaller traces on the back side of your motherboard are as fragile a hair. One slip with the iron, and your board is pretty much history. If you've never soldered before, or if you care about the motherboard in question, have your board serviced by a professional. If you are trying to make something from stuff that's already destined for the dumpster, then go ahead and solder away!
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