I Have Bulging Capacitors (don't laugh)

For the past three weeks, I have been working with a Christian Academy (K-9) to get their technology up to snuff for the new year. My final task tonight was to make a base PC image and Ghost it onto 19 identical Dell Optiplex machines in the school's Computer Lab. This was going to be 'no sweat' as the base image would take two hours to build and the 'Ghost-cast' could be done unattended overnight. No problem - that is until half of the machines wouldn't even turn on!!

After trying everything I knew to do, I called Dell Support and told them exactly what was happening. The very first thing my support person told me to do was open the case of one PC and look on the motherboard to see if any of the capacitors were bulging or leaking (!?!?) I don't mind saying that I really didn't know what a capacitor was or looked like (except for a Flux Capacitor), so for your enlightenment, they are the small vertical cylinders of assorted color randomly scattered on the motherboard.

Surely (and oddly) enough, I saw that most of the capacitor tops were rounded (bulging) and most of the bulges had corrosion on them like the terminal posts on a car battery. After checking all of the computers, 17 out of the 19 motherboards need to be replaced. The good news is that ALL of them are covered under Dell's warranty (woo-hoo!!). If they get here by Friday, it'll be a very busy weekend.

Thanks to Sam at SarcazaBlog and Carey Holzman for the capacitor pictures.
Thanks to Dr. Emmett Brown for the Flux Capacitor info.