[ChrisMarshallNY]

> Power supplies are the most common failure in electronics

In over 35 years of troubleshooting gear and systems, my experience is that 90% (no exaggeration) of problems are bad cables.

It seems even worse, these days, with high-speed serial cables, running on razor-thin margins, and often with embedded ICs.

That's why, when the IT geek comes to your desk, they just rip out all your cables, and replace them with new ones, out of the shrink-wrap. They'll toss out a hundred dollars' worth of perfectly good cables, because they know the deal. They could waste an hour, trying to troubleshoot a problem caused by an intermittent USB C cable.

[bradstewart]

Also network cables. After spending days troubleshooting weird network issues a few too many times, I just toss the entire box of miscellaneous network cables in the attic every year or two.

But capacitors are definitely the second most common issue.

[thr0w__4w4y]

Yes, network cables.

Way back when I was a staff engineer at Motorola, we'd often have network problems from workstations caused by marginal cables. At first, the IT people would come over and replace the cable, and toss the bad/old one in the person's cubicle trash can.

But I noticed over time, they all started adding one extra step: they'd cut the cable in half before tossing it in the trash.

Before the cable cutting, engineers, being engineers, would fish the "bad" cable out of the trash as soon as the IT person left ("it works almost all the time...") and use it for the next lab build-out. And then integration tests would fail intermittently, etc.

[ChrisMarshallNY]

Cutting the cable is important. I’ve learned to do that, by habit.