sledge wrote:
Hi everone,
I have been on the Amiga boards lately, reading about replacing capacitors on the various Amiga models. This is quite common among Amiga owners nowdays it seems.
So I have started to worry about my C64. So I just wanted to see if anyone already have replaced the caps on the C64. Perhaps we have better caps in the C64 than in the Amigas?
-thomas
I've been thinking about this a lot during the years - and getting more and more concerned as time go by. Replacing caps is something that is being done through out the entire vintage community, whether it's computers, arcade video games, musical instruments, and so on. But for some reason there has never been much concern about this in the C64 community (bar a few heads up).
Electrolytic capacitors usually have an estimated life time of about 10 years before degrading. I suppose the impact of degrading caps depends on their appliance and there for range from being unnoticed to severe. Old power supplies are usually were the degeneration shows first and this is where it can cause harm:
Big capacitors are used to filter and stabilize the voltage from the PSU. As the caps dry out they lose their original capacity which could allow alternating voltage from the transformer to reach the internal electronics and potentially destroy or - over time - damaging the components, such as IC's and semiconductors.
Replacing caps in the C64? The sooner the better!