There Is Water

I managed to install new capacitors in my trusty iMac's logic board (the Apple equivalent of a motherboard) this weekend. There were 28 of them in total. It took me around 15 hours or so. That's right. Most people are out doing stuff on the weekends. As for me...I stayed home, so I could bang my head against the wall while trying not to burn myself with a soldering iron. (I'm not a nerd.) This operation was much more complicated than I expected. After spending two hours pulling everything out of my computer (and I mean ev-er-y-thing), I was almost regretting my decision to make this repair. There were bits and pieces of my Mac all over the place. (Short recap here: About four or five months ago, my iMac went down for the count. Fortunately, I have an external backup. Unfortunately, all my music programs are on that computer, which means I haven't composed in a very long time. When the computer went down, I had just started a piece for wind ensemble, so that's been setting unfinished all this time. Anyway, repair bill was around $500-$600. Why? New Logic board. Why? One bad capacitor. That's right. I said one cheap little capacitor. Apparently, this is a common problem with the capacitors used in my computer, so I decided to replace all 28. The capacitors were about a buck each, so the penny pincher in me was incredibly excited.) After reinstalling everything and latching my computer back together, it was time for the big test. I plugged it in and pushed power (halfway expecting it to blowup), and my computer made that loud "BING!" sound that says, "Hey. Look at me! I'm starting up!" Yay! We'll see what happens. I did a lot of googling before and during this little procedure, but there were still quite a few things I had to wing. I'm going to keep a close eye on it. If all seems well, I'll post some tips here, just in case someone else out there is crazy enough to attempt brain surgery on their computer.