I had gotten an SE/30 recently and it started up perfectly, other than it seemed to have a dead battery (kept losing its settings). I thought that perhaps I had one that was an exception, since it was running perfectly and from looking at the caps (without removing the system board), they appeared to be ok.

When I removed the board to change out the battery, I saw where there were almost unnoticeable slicks of capacitor leakage, I had caught it just in time. I cleaned the board, replaced the caps, the battery, cleaned and re-lubricated the floppy drive, put it all back together and played Maelstrom on it (external color monitor, since it has a video card).

Retro-fun! :beige:

The moral of this story is that replacing the caps is not an option if you enjoy using your aging SE/30.

There are differing opinions on how to do it, but I agree with the consensus that it has to be done as soon as possible on any remaining SE/30's.