Dan Deucalion's post (clipped)

<<<<How would I be able to tell if a capacitor is faulty ... and would it be
possible for the problem only to exist for 90 seconds or so at boot up?>>>

Hi,

The capacitors "heads" tend to become sort of "conical" as opposed to a real flat head of a good one. for the second part of your query... no definitely not.

going through the thread I do not find any ref. to the make/model of your system though another post by Walter Ermacora said his was compaq.

it will be helpful to know at least the mobo make/model since some like ASUS have a small cylindrical shaped speaker near the cmos battery (this was pointed out in the list to me by an adminstrator of the list) 

in my case it was giving a sort of sweet "chimes" (ASUS MOBO)"DING/DONG"
when there was a problem with my HDD.

since you have disconnected literally everything except CPU I am wondering if there is a way for you to record the "BUZZ" sound and post it to the list in a say "wav" format.

HTH and good luck in isolating the problem area---Venkat

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