TiVo Trauma

For a while now while watching TV, mostly live TV, the TiVo has occasionally restarted. This is super annoying, doubly so when it's the Super Bowl.Granted, this was a boring game... but still...The hard drive swap process is pretty painless all things considered. I had already made a backup when I did the swap the last time so I was able to just restore that onto another drive. Since I moved to cloud backups of my data I have a pile of drives that are essentially unused. So I grabbed a 1.5GB drive and it was off to the races. The only strange thing was needing to fire up a Windows XP VM that could run the old program.Off to the races! Six screws on the back and the top comes off. Four for the drive platform and that comes off. Four more for the drive and it's free. Installation is reverse of disassembly.But look...See anything amiss?Those caps have seen better days it looks like! The CapXon caps have given up the ghost. I'm surprised that it worked at all! Thankfully I have a box of caps I bought last year off eBay. $45 well spent with just this one use! I plucked out two 1000µF 10V caps and it was a simple task of desoldering and soldering on the new ones.Now it was plug everything in and screw it back together and it was all good.In case you were wondering, the old caps which were rated at 1000µF were now down to 6µF with an ESR of 22.3Ω which really proves that these caps were well and truly broken. If I were really that curious I would reinstall the old caps just for fun and probe the output with my scope. I really wonder what the loaded voltage rails' ripple would look like. My guess is it would be a horror show.