I got a complete Dell Dimension 4300 computer setup! It’s been so long since I’ve done one of these project log articles, I thought now that I got this, it’d be the perfect time to get back into it!
It looks pretty awesome, doesn’t it? Well, it isn’t working perfectly. It can’t boot up, and it looks like there’s something up with that hard drive.
Sure enough, we have a hard drive failure error. That’s really no surprise on such an old system. Good thing I have a big bin of hard drives!
Inspection & Teardown
When I opened the computer though, I immediately noticed something else was wrong. Can you tell what it is?
Here’s a closer view. See it now? It’s not just the dust, there’s another problem. It’s sitting right above the CPU auxiliary power connector! We’ve got a bad capacitor!
That too, is also not surprising on such an old system as this one. But it means that there’s definitely work ahead of us.
In order to get a good look at the cap, it’s best that the motherboard is removed from the system. So I’ll go ahead and take the board out. In doing so, let’s check out the cards it has!
These systems use a convenient green latching lever that holds in the cards. On my system though, the green plastic has broken somewhat and it no longer has an extended piece to hold as a hinge onto the metal frame. I’ll come back to this later with a simple fix.
The video card is an ATi Rage 128 Pro 16MB SDR, DP/N# 7K113.
The 10/100 Ethernet card uses a Davicom 9102A chip. I’ve hardly seen Davicom NICs at all, but the last one I had was in a cheapie USB 10Mbit NIC, colored in translucent blue using the DM9601 chip. Anyone remember those? That had to have been one of the earlier (and most crappy) USB Ethernet solutions! Given PCI is of course the more mature interface for Ethernet cards (second only to ISA), I’d expect this card should be perfectly okay.
Lastly, here’s the modem card! Not so interesting, other than the fact that it has a built-in speaker I suppose. Not as cool as some of the ISA ones I have!
And here’s 128MB of SDRAM!
This system utilizes a motherboard tray mount, which is quite convenient. The green clip at the right-hand side is lifted, then the board is pulled in that direction. And as easily as that, the board is free!
One screw fastens it to the tray. Remove it, and the motherboard is now ready to be recapped! Now let’s get a really good look at that capacitor!
There it is! A bloated Nichicon HM capacitor of 1800uF capacitance, rated for 16 volts. I checked my part bins and I have a suitable replacement! And since the others are most definitely seeing wear as well, I will replace those other two to the left. I plan on replacing more later, particularly the Nichicon HMs as pre-2005 ones (like those on my 2001 board) have a manufacturing defect, which I learned long ago thanks to Badcaps.net. But for now, I simply want to get the most obvious problem out of the way and do a little easy extra too.
Never forget to remove the CMOS battery! Failure to do so could result in the BIOS getting corrupted while tinkering with the capacitors.
Here are my replacement capacitors!
And here they are, now installed! You might notice that instead of two Nichicon HMs and one Panasonic FM, it’s now one Nichicon and two Panasonics. This is because I realized after the above shot that the other Nichicon HM was actually a 1200uF, rather than an 1800uF. So I used a 1000uF Panasonic FM (what I had on hand) to substitute, which is fine because of the 20% tolerance rule. I’ve never once had a problem doing this and I’ve recapped many boards since 2016.
(Later note: I would also like to note that the eagle-eyed amongst you will notice that I actually put those capacitors in backwards! Dell actually backwards-masks these boards, and uses the white arrow to indicate positive rather than negative, which is the total opposite of what the capacitor itself does as well as most motherboards. The system did not turn on at all until I corrected this.)
That is now done! While we’re at it, why not replace that ancient thermal paste?
It turns out that Dell is using some sort of thermal pad business here. Well I don’t want that, I want fresh paste! This pad was easily removed with a razor blade. It reveals the S-spec as SL59V, which is in fact the slowest Pentium 4 on Socket 478. The only slower ones are those on the short-lived Socket 423! I’ve very rarely ever seen a Socket 423 board, they are incredibly elusive. This is with good reason, since that socket was canned so quickly after Intel released it, much to the misfortune of the early P4 adopters at that time.
I decided to put some nice Arctic MX-5 on there. I have many different pastes, but I thought since P4s are practically little toaster ovens in a CPU socket (especially Prescott!) And so, the heatsink is placed back on, and the board is installed back into the case.
With this expansion card retention lever, I chose to install a bent-up paperclip to go thru the hole and hold it in. Works as good as new now!
BUT – there’s something else really important that must be checked before the system can be considered good. When capacitors on the motherboard fail, it’s very common for it to be caused by a bad power supply. I’m going to check that now!
Here is the power supply. It’s a 250-watt unit designed by Hipro, model HP-P2507F3P, with Dell’s brand name slapped on it and given the DP/N of 1E115.
And would you look at that – the culprit is found!
At this point, I looked thru my spares, and the unfortunate thing I found is that none of the other ones I have will fit. Dell did something annoying with this model, and it’s in the way the case’s frame is designed. The metal doesn’t leave a nice, big opening for the power supply like in most computer cases. No – this one actually only leaves a proper opening for the AC socket and passive PFC switch! So if you have a power supply with a mains switch in the back, you can’t use it! Alas, all of my spare power supplies have that switch, so I don’t have a fitting replacement.
For the time being, I chose to borrow one from my other Dell Dimension, which unfortunately has shorter wiring than is desired in the case of this crazy computer’s design. As in, literally the very case itself!
Here’s how that looks! Please excuse the dust – cleaning will happen soon. I can’t open the case very far at all due to the short wiring, so this is quite impractical. I’m going to need to either repair or replace the power supply, and in either case I must order it online.
You will also see I’ve installed a replacement hard drive under the original. I’m using a Western Digital WD400BB, which I’ve already thoroughly tested & wiped during an earlier mass testing session. The old drive is an IBM IC35L020AVER07-0, a 20GB drive.
Installing Windows XP
Now let’s get down to the software business! The computer powers on happily and boots from the Windows XP CD. The DVD drive it has actually doesn’t seem to read the disc properly, so I have another temporary one dangling for the time being. Once the operating system is installed, I’ll try to use a laser lens cleaning disc in the original drive, and if that doesn’t work, I’ll just junk it and make the temporary replacement into a permanent one.
My handy-dandy Windows XP installation CD is one that I customized with Nlite. Thanks to that fantastic tool and my customization efforts with it, the only thing I have to tell Setup to do is format the hard drive. Once that is done, everything else takes care of itself! So convenient! Anyone who’s ever installed XP can tell you that it asks a whole bunch of questions at random times during setup, so you can’t leave it unattended for long. This takes care of that completely!
If I had to guess, since this computer originally would have come with Windows Me judging by the key sticker it has, Windows XP probably has most of the drivers built-in, if not all. But that said, it is now late at night, so I’m going to come back to this tomorrow and hopefully be greeted with a Windows XP desktop!
Yay, it works! Sure enough, just like I speculated, XP recognizes all of the devices out of the box – no driver installation needed. How convenient!
The original CD drive is unfortunately bust, even a lens cleaning disc couldn’t save it. So I promptly replaced with the drive I used to install XP. With that done, let’s get this thing cleaned out!
Cleanup
Using my trusty Metro Datavac 500-watt powered dust blower, I was able to remove a lot of the dust. Still, a fine dust layer was caked onto many of the components.
Using alcohol and a brush to clean the surfaces, everything looks much nicer now!
Behold the startup! There’s still one issue remaining though that I’d like to fix. It’s quiet, but in the above video, you can hear that the fan makes a low growl that slightly fluctuates as long as the PC is on. Clearly, the fan has seen better days. But I’ve heard much worse! Still, I like to help out any fan that sounds a little worn, so I’m going to add sewing machine oil to lubricate it. I’ve done this with many fans, and as long as the fan wasn’t already way too tired out, it does a great job! Even if it doesn’t wind up quieting the fan down any, it’ll still prolong its life.
Motherboard Recap (cont.)
To further prolong the life of the motherboard, I will replace all the Nichicon HM capacitors on it.
I have taken a look across the board (literally), and have confirmed the only two dubious Nichicons are those behind the CPU VRM circuitry. The rest are Rubycons, which have a good rep and have no known problems like the pre-2005 Nichicon HMs. Seeing as these reputable caps are not bloated and the computer has been working in my testing thus far, I will leave them alone as I see no reason to mess with them.
All of the necessary motherboard capacitor replacement is done! At this point, all the dodgy caps are gone. Curiously enough, I noticed that one of the slide clips in the motherboard for holding it to the metal tray has a couple of absent solder! None of the rest of them are like that. I wonder how many more Dell boards are out there with unsoldered components…?
Now, once the power supply capacitors come in, I will be installing those. That will complete the recap!
Power Supply Recap
I’m back again! Today is February 2nd, and I have received the capacitor order from Mouser Electronics!
As you can clearly see, not all of the caps are bad. But, I want to make sure to get rid of those low-quality capacitors from the capacitor plague era! I’m replacing all of the vented electrolytics, and will be leaving the teensy ventless ones alone. I choose to do this because those are generally more reliable. So, let’s get this done!
Everything was going quite smoothly for a while. That is, until I noticed that some of the capacitors I ordered were too big! Whoops! Specifically, it’s the 4700 uF and 3300 uF.
The reason this happened is because I actually select capacitors via an AutoHotKey script that I wrote, which automatically pulls up a Mouser listing based on the specs I type in. However, I didn’t do any kind of checks for cap diameter! I’d best be doing that next time! If not adding an automatic size check functionality, it’s at least worth a quick look to see if it pulled up some huge nonstandard size before adding it to the cart.
Now, one huge cap isn’t necessarily an issue by itself. But a big problem happened when I tried to fit one of the 3300 uF capacitors in next to the big 4700 uF!
Well, the answer to “how,” is “you don’t.” It simply wouldn’t go in, because it was bumping up against the side of the other capacitor. One exceeded size spec is one thing, but fitting two oversized caps next to one another? No way! Even getting a normal size cap adjacent to an oversized one can take some care, but this really isn’t going to fly.
But I’m not about to place another order from Mouser if I don’t absolutely have to. I decided to turn to my scrap pile…
Bingo! In my scrap pile, I found an EVGA power supply with perfect replacements! They’re tall Teapo branded caps. And though “Teapo is cheapo” – as is said over at The BadCaps.net Forum – the capacitors themselves show a manufacturing date of 2020. That’s a whole heck of a lot newer than the rest of the components in this 2001 computer! The capacitor plague ended well over a decade ago, so I see this as perfectly safe.
Huzzah! All of the capacitors are now installed! The green guys are the 2020 Teapos, and the brown are of course the oversized Nippon Chemi-Cons that I ordered from Mouser. I was short on one Teapo, which is totally fine since at least their small size still allowed me to use one of the giant NCCs. And so, the repair is complete! YAY!
I looked everything over, made sure the solder joints were good and what not (sorry, I forgot to get a picture of that), and also double-checked the polarity of each capacitor to make sure I didn’t inadvertently build a bomb! (I’ve made that mistake before!) Following this, I went ahead and plugged in my power supply tester to make the supply run, then plugged the power cord in…
It works! And no pops, booms or sparks. Just good power! Now that it has been recapped, there need be no worries of bad caps sending terrible unfiltered power to the motherboard, and basically undoing my repairs to it.
So now, all I’ve gotta do is just put that power supply in there, and it’s ready to rock and roll! When time allows, I’m going to be getting some pictures of it running some games and post them here. But for now, at least the capacitor replacement is done!
The Finale
Well, I’ve been distracted for awhile – it’s now May. But the great news is, I’m done! I put it thru a lot of testing with Prime95, and it’s stable as a rock. I tested it for two weeks straight!
I’m going to be listing this for sale online. After all, I personally don’t particularly have a use case for it, as I’ve already got plenty of other stuff. But I wanted to be sure to document it along the way!
