Removing a Blown Capacitor from an HP Thin Client

Overview

Several of my HP thin clients won’t power up due to blown capacitors. In this video, I show how to remove a faulty 2200µF 6.3V capacitor using a desoldering pump. This is part 1 of a 2-part series—next video will cover installing the replacement and testing. If your thin client only shows LED activity then dies, or won’t power on at all, this might be your problem.

Key Moments

• Identifying the blown capacitor (Sanyo 2200µF 6.3V)
• Applying liquid flux to improve solder flow
• Using a desoldering pump to remove solder from both leads
• Wiggling the component to loosen stubborn connections
• Successfully extracting the failed capacitor
• Preparing the replacement cap with proper polarity orientation
• Bending leads to prevent the cap from falling out before soldering

Full Transcript (Edited)

Hey YouTube, today we’re going to be doing some desoldering of some caps here. A little bit of additional context: I have some of these HP thin clients that I put together with Windows 98, and some of them have capacitor issues. They don’t even power up—they either sometimes show a little bit of activity and then power down, or nothing works.

What I’ve noticed is that they tend to have an issue with this cap right here. I’m going to start by removing that cap and replacing it with one of these guys, which is an identical unit. Then I’ll try it out and see what happens.

I have this desoldering gun here that I got from Amazon. I’ve already done it for another one here—let me show you what I’m doing. It’s wiggling because it’s still attached like that. It’s not soldered in yet, so as soon as I solder that in, I’m gonna be able to power it up and see what happens. I’m not replacing these other ones because they physically look okay. This is a 2200 microfarad 6.3 volt capacitor, so I’m just going to replace the one that looked physically bad and see how far I go with that.

This one—all it did was the little LED here turned on and nothing else happened. We’ll see.

Alright, so I’m waiting for this to warm up, and then I’m gonna go ahead and take that out.

Here’s the board, and the cap that I’m going to be replacing is this one here. These two connectors, these two leads. I have the desoldering pump heated up, and what I’m going to do is I’m going to apply a little bit of liquid flux—some of this stuff—onto the board there to improve the process. That just helps keep the solder flowing and makes the job a little bit easier. It prevents the solder from building up into a blob, basically.

I went ahead and pushed the pump there, and now I’m gonna go ahead and desolder. Alright, so I see that one was done. I’m gonna go ahead and pump this again. I’m gonna do that a little bit more. Let me warm it up again, wiggle it around, suck it out.

You can see here—let me take you closer—this is the capacitor that I need to remove here. I’m gonna go ahead and wiggle it out. You can see that one leg right there is moving. This other one on the left needs to be desoldered a little bit more, so what I’m going to do is I’m just gonna get the soldering gun and wiggle it a little bit more to loosen it up. That should do it.

Yep! And here’s the cap. It’s a 2200 microfarad 6.3 volts from Sanyo. Cool!

Now what I do is I’m going to get one of these out and prepare it. This is the new cap. One thing to keep in mind is if you’re ever doing this, keep in mind that these are polarized. That means that one is a negative and one is a positive. Make sure that you insert it using this indicator here—this line. As you can see, the line in the old cap was pointing in this direction with the white section. This motherboard here has this guide—they color-coded it so that the white side coincides with the strip here, and that indicates the polarity of the capacitor.

Then you just put it in there, kind of separate the leads like that so that the capacitor doesn’t fall out, and now it’s ready for a little bit of flux and then some soldering. That’s what I’m going to do next.