Can we talk about why everyone skips the capacitor discharge step?

I just watched three how-to videos on laptop motherboard repair that said to poke the board with a screwdriver to drain juice. That's not a thing. I measured 34 volts left in a capacitor 10 minutes after unplugging a Dell last week. Took a cheap resistor and 20 seconds to do it right. Anyone else bothered by this or just me?

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derek_bell12d ago

Man, that screwdriver thing drives me up a wall. I read a forum post last month where a guy bragged about doing that on a gaming laptop and he said it made a loud pop, then the board just died right there. A pop is never a good sign, you know? It means you just blew a trace or something. Your resistor trick is solid, I do the same thing but I use a pair of alligator clips and a 100 ohm resistor I keep in a little bag. Takes longer to set up than to actually drain it, but I've never smoked a board that way. And yeah, 34 volts is plenty to kill a chip if you slip with a probe. People are just lazy and want a shortcut, but the shortcut costs them a new motherboard half the time.

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