Well as you may or may not be aware, I picked up a portable the other day specifically for hacking/modding. At first I thought i was going to convert it into a modern machine, but then decided not to. But it still not out of the realm of possibilities. 

But.. First I used the LCD to perform my backlight mod, but the LCD itself was bad with tunnel vision effects. So i switched to my spare. 

Then, I decided to pull out the logic board and recap it. 

But before I recapped it, I decided to check out the overall health. I think this may have been a victim of using the wrong power adapter or something. 

It had more fried chips than I have seen so far. What threw me off was the SWIM looked brown. instead of black. It also had a small crack in it, So i knew it was dead. 

Removed the swim, but it was still pulling a ton of current from the power supply. Several other chips were getting hot and smoking. I have outlined the chips here: 



Regardless, I was able to replace all the bad chips and the motherboard came alive. It works again. 

But, wholy cow! No idea what caused this sort of cascade failure. 

I figured I would share this with you all.