j03king

A person from work linked me to this site regarding a problem she's been having recently with her Alcatel Speedtouch 530 modem. Telling me for a week or so she pulled her hair trying to find answers on the web why her modems been loggin on the ISP for a long time (even askin for support from alcatel.. with no help). To cut the story short she (very hot chick) decided to come to me for some help to try her luck (being the only aproachable Comp/Net Engr for the company)...

Anyhow what I found:
- plugged in the speedtouch 530
- hmmm indeed it took quite a while logging into an isp
- her's actually warm booted 3 or so times before it got a successful link
- did all the usual. Factory restore, reconfig, firmware upg, study log..etc..etc.etc same result
- quite bored and puzzled nothing to do at 2am, i concluded must be hardware fault
- about to give up and switch off the modem and give her a nicer modem in our scrap heap of equipment, when I noticed the modem was quite hot after only 30mins being on.hmmmm
- pulled it out of the noisy little lab into a quiter environment and discovered what i suspected... a high pitchy noise. To me it suggested a leaky capacitor.
- 2:21am the company's network is still in order LOL so still quite BORED nothing much to do at work, I dediced to tinker with this $20 modem (anthing to impress this hot chick I'm hoping to get to know better)... so opened up the bugger and found.. guess what.. a leaky capacitor .
- Called up one of our tech. LOL told him to replace the leaky 1000uF 6.3v capacitor near the Power switch and put some sort of heatsink on the power regulators and the speedtouch chipset
- After 20mins it came back to me. Tested it. WOW so silent. Plugged it on the wall... Whaaam. No warmboot after the POST.. connected to the ISP first go.

- Next day I did some over time. Gave her back the modem. She asked me how she could repay me and told her lunch her shout. Whoo hoo

PS:
Just a lesson to look out for with the Speedtouch 530 modem, possibly other Alcatel modems: Heating issues due to bad design.
Buy a better modem.

cheers,
ian