Usually one of the first questions I get asked is 'What exactly will you do to my motherboard?'
I do a complete refurbishing of your board once I receive it. When it first arrives I clean it thoroughly, removing dust bunnies from the crevices. Pre-testing depends on the overall condition and quantity of the failed capacitors. If there's more than just a couple, many times I do not pre-test them; as operating a board with failed capacitors can cause damage! If I feel comfortable pre-testing, I will set it up in the motherboard tester and fire it up. This will answer a number of questions right off the bat, such as:
1) Does the board POST (Power On Self Test)
2) Is the BIOS the most current revision
3) Test stability within an operating system
/ Burn-in Utilities
4) Are bad capacitors the true problem, or are there other faults
After a close examination and bad capacitors are verified to be the problem, I mark and remove all the necessary capacitors 470uF and higher. Note that some model systems/boards use a mixture of low-quality junk capacitors and high-quality capacitors (Panasonic and/or Rubycon) or polymer capacitors. If this is the case, it may not be necessary to replace them all, just the problematic ones. However, if it's an older board, even the higher quality brand electrolytics will be replaced due to their age. This is more common in retro hardware. Polymer capacitors very seldom fail.
After identifying and removing the bad caps, I then replace them with high-quality NEW capacitors. The motherboard is once again connected to the test jig and the BIOS is flashed with the latest revision (if necessary), and the abusive testing begins once again.
Using my self booting diagnostics utilities, I run it through a 24-hour constant burn-in cycle. Once it passes that, I'll look at it closely to make sure that nothing else on the board is failing. If it can pass my testing, there's not much more that one can dish out that it can't handle beyond the motherboard's design specs.
I've been in the computer field since 1993, and in the electronics field since 1990. I owned a PC store for a great many of those years and have more worldly experience in this field than money and college could ever buy! You can rest assured that when your board comes home it will be back in tip-top shape again!! I offer a full warranty on the new capacitors to back this up!
Notice!!!
ANY REPAIR NOT PAID FOR WITHIN 60 DAYS OF RECEIVING IT WITHOUT PRIOR ARRANGEMENTS WILL BE SOLD OR OTHERWISE DISPOSED OF!! I just can't keep these things longer than that, they do suck up a lot of shelf space that other repairs need!!