[mythtv-users] Backend machine seems to crash every few days

[Gary Buhrmaster]

On Tue, Oct 4, 2016 at 5:39 AM, Stephen Worthington
<stephen_agent at jsw.gen.nz> wrote:
....
> As I understand it

I have never seen a (trusted) independent report,
but depending on the rumor/story you want to
believe, it was anywhere from (gross) incompetence,
to (malicious) corporate sabotage, with some
negligence thrown around for good measure.
Regardless of the original motivations or the intent,
the impacts were experienced by many across
the industry.

In theory, anyone with a PC newly purchased
in the last decade should be safe from the
"plague", but with this community being proud
of running older systems, they may still
encounter it from time to time (and components
sitting on the shelf may be potential victims).

Because most people do not internalize
statistics, and there has always been a
background percentage of failures, some
people will accuse "bad caps" for just the
usual failure rates.  Without checking the
actual manufacturing date codes, that is
likely premature (but facts have never stopped
the Internet from coming to a conclusion).

But that all presumes the design itself is good.
With the rush to the bottom, the headroom
for component long term drift and long term
electrolytic evaporation is lessened.  So the
lifetime (for non-premium designs) is lowered.
Heat, in particular can substantially impact
the lifetime of the cap (and things have
gotten smaller and (localized) hotter, and
the ripple currents higher (higher heat)).

[The "solid" caps which are all the rage now
in MBs are partially a result of the experiences
of the "bad cap" years, but also deal with other
realities of life on a motherboard and their
demands]

And, just as an aside, with the proliferation of
multi-nationals manufacturing, no companies
country of incorporation means much in terms
of "high quality".  It is the specific sample
(usually related to the lot) that matters.  At
least one of the firms included in the list of
potential sources of "bad caps" was reportedly
a well known highly regarded firm (although it
may have been the case that those caps were
counterfeit, or simply sample failures (see the
comment on statistics)).