Over time I have had Al electrolytic capacitors fail numerous times in various equipment I have owned. I can count as many as 4 PC power supplies that had capacitors "blow". Long ago an O-Scope I owned was disabled due to failed caps in the horizontal section and several CRT monitors have failed due to capacitor faults. The most recent failure was about 2 months ago when three Al Elec caps that failed to shorts and bulging cans on an Intel manufactured Pentium motherboard in one of my Gateway computers. In this most recent case the motherboard failed because one of the shorted caps put so much load on a surface mounted DPAK linear regulator that it got hot enough to melt its solder. The part slid down about 1.5 cm off its pads opening its shorted load connection and thus cooling in its new location. Talk about a strange failure!!

Michael Karas