A bunch of PC manufacturers are being hit with bad capacitors. (If you slept through high school electronics, capacitors are used to temporarily store electrical charge and regulate voltage — old timers sometimes call them condensers).
CNET has a good picture of the problem:
You can see the swollen caps in the back. These things swell and then leak a kind of yellow goo which crusts over, utlimately causing video problems and intermittent system failures.
Dell has this problem on some Optiplex workstations (incidentally, the very workstation I have in my office). But they aren’t the only ones. We’re talking about HP, Apple and apparently others have this issue.
Unknown is how widespread the problem is.
CNET article here.
Alex Eckelberry