Hey, Patrick, thanks for your work at Ray and these clear reports!  

Yes, there is a long ugly history of leaky capacitors.  Both Dell and (way back when they were selective-source) IBM had motherboard-replacement programs (for units out-of-warranty even).  But I'm not surprised to hear there is no such program in place now.  

There is a special program called Asset Disposal which a school can order when they have accumulated a fair amount of discarded technology.  I don't know how literal you were being about throwing out those boards (or if you meant just the boards or the whole computer main unit including case).  But for future reference [and for others reading this -- there will be a quiz next Tuesday!], while it's okay to literally toss out small pieces once in a while in the trash barrels, whole computers and other major pieces should be set aside for later official Asset Disposal.  At Ray, I think Ms. Cobb was starting to put stuff in that area right outside the lab and the IDF.  

Patrick, if you are back on roughly the schedule I think you were on, how about if I stop by Ray tomorrow afternoon (Wednesday)?  We can look collaboratively at remaining printer issues, and if you are caught up with much of that stored-hulks-rehabbing we can get back to the domain fileserver and capitalize on your smart inactive-users-removal Python script by trying to run some backups on user documents.  

Cheers,

  ==Mitch