This was the CPU fan of a laptop. The dust bunny is 17mm thick at its thickest point.

I realised something was wrong when I went into the kitchen and couldn't see to the other side of it for all the smoke. Capacitor fail, bigtime!

Investigating a UPS which no longer seems to charge its battery I found these crystals growing inside.

The horizontal pin in this image has broken the through hole plating and barely connects at all.

As long as there are electrolytic capacitors in PSUs there will be work for people who can solder.

This fuse failed after the switching transistor had gone short and taken out a couple of resistors around it. Note also the protective earth on this PSU.

The CCU3000 MCU, 6502 core, in my Panasonic TV crashed and wrote grabage to its Teletext decoder chip which it also uses for the on screen messages. A power cycle was needed to reset it.

This is the sort of thing that happens inside your laptop when you drop it. Eventually it just stops.

This was found while disassembling some scrap PCs. As this capacitor was protected under a heatsink and is soldered solidly at one end it must have been made like this.

How to cook a laptop. First, close off all the ventilation pathways.

This DAB radio had died. The lights were on but no one was home

The thing lit up top and bottom in the middle of the picture is a vacuum switch and no, they're not supposed to light up like that. They're not supposed to light up at all especially considering that the body of the switch is made of ceramic and is about as transparent as a coffee mug. The fact you can see it light up means there's really bad things happening inside that switch.

The two red wires are supposed to be soldered to the pin but neither of them was. The only thing holding them in place was the heatshrink sleeve.

This power supply 'just stopped working'. They must not have been near it when the length of copper track was vapourised and spread all over the inside of the case.

Everything blew once the switching transistor failed. The current limit resistor, the transformer primary, the controller chip and the main fuse were just the obvious victims.

This has to be the most crap I've ever found blocking one fan. Unfortunately it looks like this was found too late to save the laptop.

This Netgear wireless access point spent the last part of its life partly submerged. One consequence of that is that some metal has disolved from traces and components and been deposited elsewhere by electrolytic action. Some of the unpopulated component pads have been disolved almost completely.