Skyworth Capacitor Revisited

My Skyworth was one of the earliest shipped from HiViZone's initial pre-order. My order time was about 1 1/2 minutes after they began accepting orders so I received my player in the very first shipment.


Up until a couple of weeks ago my unit has operated glitch free with the original capacitor. Suddenly the usual loading problems appeared and I would sometimes have to open/close the drawer up to 10 times to get a disc to load. Once the first disc loaded, changing discs were not a problem as long as I did not power down.


Last week I tried unplugging the blue lights and karoke board to see if it would help. It did not. This weekend I replaced the capacitor, following the directions and pictures posted here, and I am back to normal.


I only bring this up again because my player may have been the first to fail so long into its life. It seems most have failed very quickly or continue to work without a problem. I would consider my hours logged to be a bit above normal, probably averaging 2-3 movies a week since getting the unit back in late May. (At least I think that is above normal, even for this board.) I thought I was in the clear since everything was working fine up until just a few weeks ago, but unfortunately I was wrong.


One other observation, there appeared to be some brown spots on the underside of the board near the capacitor, almost as if something had been burning. Anyone else see this?


Lastly, I wanted to thank everyone who contributed to solving the problem. In particular, the pictures that were posted by Frode were invaluable and made the work easy, even for someone who has never done anything like this before. Your contributions are greatly appreciated!