Few hours ago, my colleague told me that he has a broken processor. It was an Intel Pentium4 Extreme Edition (I havent’s checked the model number). One of the capacitor was broken, or removed accidentally.

Added: I didn’t take any photo from this broken processor. Sorry! Because I thought that this one would end in the trash bin (or became my key chain).

So, I needed to find the capacitor to replace the broken one. I went to look for some old motherboard. I checked for similiar size (I didn’t bring my Capacitance Meter nor my soldering kit for such SMD devices). So I was completely using my feeling to pick the right capacitor. For your information, this SMD capacitor size was around 1 mm only – or even less! So this made all the process became so complicated for common user.

I found some old mobos with similiar capacitor size (photo above). Then, I removed it with two iron solder (well, as I’ve told you, I didn’t bring any special SMD kits, so two iron solders were the best option to remove the SMD briskly without heating them much). I removed two capacitors from the mobo (one for backup only). As you can see from the picture above, the two capacitors have been removed.

Then, I soldered the capacitor to the processor. Sorry for the bad look from my job. As I’ve told you, I didn’t bring my special SMD solder and removal kit to clean up to job (and the debris from the old broken capacitor was still there, couldn’t clean them up without my SMD kits). So, I just tried to clean the mess as best as I could (sadly, the currently available iron solder’s tip was quite big – that wasn’t the one for SMD purpose so made the cleaning job even harder). Then I just plugged the replacement there and made sure the pins were connected. The debris left there from the old broken capacitor made the new capacitor couldn’t be put in flat condition. It looks bad on the photos 😉

Then I asked my friend to test this processor. Well, it worked fine (at least I could get into the BIOS). Will try to install some application later to check its stability.

Note: All pictures were taken with Canon EOS 10D and 50mm lens.