In my case, only 4 capacitors burst. It’s hard to see from the pictures–which admittedly are of really poor quality–but the remaining caps did OK. I think the card just gave up the ghost once all the electrolyte boiled off (you can see a little of the brown stuff around the edges–there’s no solid states on here). :)

On the plus side, most solid state capacitors I’ve seen in the last couple years have all been square, so they’re fairly easy to spot!

The copper coil is an inductor of sorts and is most likely a choke coil. See here for a brief discussion about someone inquiring how to replacing one. It’s not melted, though. I believe that it’s actually embedded in epoxy in the 7600s that happens to be colored gray.

Currently, for my new build, I’m using a Zotac (450 GTS) card. It was a toss up between MSI, Gigabyte, Asus, and Zotac. I wasn’t willing to spend a whole lot on the card as I’m not a huge gamer, and the MSI cards at the time had complaints related to noisy cooling (big minus). So far, the Zotac seems to be holding up quite well, but I’ve only had it for the whole of about 3 months. It runs a little cooler than my last EVGA card (9600 GSO) at 65C under heavy load versus almost 71C (!) but seems to do well. I needed it mostly for the dual DVIs, and it was reasonably inexpensive. I may replace it down the road with a more powerful one, but it does quite well and the heat sink seems better designed than the two previous EVGA cards I’ve had. The one on the 7600 was a joke.

I’m not sure if this is exclusively an EVGA problem, and it might just be coincidence with the bad caps that flooded the market for a few years (and still continue to). It does give me pause for thought about purchasing something from a company that doesn’t vet their components…

But, another capacitor, at the edge opposite the VGA connectors (there’s 2 there), the one closer to the edge, has also burst. Did that one also burst for you?

I did hear pops – but I didn’t think it was coming from my computer! My god!

Elsewhere on the ‘net I read that the caps are “electrolytic” and not “solid” caps, but they are painted to look like solid caps (no plastic cover, the blue crescents).

I wonder if this is an EVGA problem? And what’s that copper-coily-thing-in-grey among the capacitors – the top of it seems melted, just as in your pics.

Ps. What video card do you have now and did you buy it after good research? How is it performing now?

If I find something that works, I’ll be sure to post it!

Ultimately, you really only need to copy Last Session and Last Tabs, if they’re still recoverable, before restarting Chrome (again). Otherwise, Chrome will clobber them.

If Current Session and Current Tabs are listed as recoverable, you might try restoring them. That’s tricky, because it depends on the state Chrome was in when they got zapped.

2) Depends on what your D: drive is. If it’s just a partition where you can temporarily store files, I’d make use of it since it affords a little extra protection that you won’t accidentally trash something you intended to keep. Also, it doesn’t hurt to keep a backup of Chrome’s user data for your account, but as you noticed–it gets big!

3) Yeah, just remove Current Session and Current Tabs, replacing them with Last Session and Last Tabs. Make sure to renamed Last Session to Current Session and Last Tabs to Current Tabs, probably before you restart Chrome.

3.5) I'm not sure, I haven't tried that. I'd imagine that it should have your session data for that session (browsing history, mostly), but the tabs will be gone if that file has been permanently removed or is unrecoverable. However, you should be able to retrieve what you wanted from the browsing history.

I'm definitely a taboholic. Back in the days prior to Firefox 3.x, I usually had ~500 tabs open. When Mozilla released Firefox 3, it seemed quite happy to freeze and/or crash ~250 tabs.

Nowadays, I generally have Firefox and Chrome open for various things (usually documentation-related, but not always), and several windows open for Chrome. I've noticed the latter doesn't gracefully handle a gazillion tabs, but it's still doable.

Hope this helps! If you still can't quite get it working, just drop a line. I really should rewrite the article to be more specific...

Great post and very helpful! Here’s a more specific case (me):

Cleaned the registry files and redundant files on the computer (2,24GB) with CCleaner.
Haven’t noticed the Applications tab, where I could have said to keep the last session and history from Chrome… so I “deleted” them… all :D (yup, including History :P )

Then, heard about Active Undelete, got it and wondered HOW I can get back the lost session, USING this program… (scanned C:\ and saw that Last Session is “recoverable”)

So:
1. Do I have to get back ALL the Google folder? (700 MB)
2. Do I copy/recover it on D:\ ?
3. HOW do I make use of the last session file? (oh, u answered that one…)

3.5. Does your method work if I have the Last session file, without Last Tabs?

I’ll go tomorrow on that computer and see if I can recover Last Tabs, too.

Thank you very, VERY much for this article and for a response.

I only had like 30 tabs open, but they had important information…

I was beginning to think I’m the only Tab freak , or taboholic as you said :D

I only use Windows and Linux, but from what I can find, the appropriate files should be located under $HOME/Library/Application Support/Google/Chrome/Default. Browse to there and follow the instructions as with Windows but make sure to back up the folder first (just in case).