Broken DVD Player part 2

Ordering those parts wasn't quite straightforward. The diodes, capacitor and fuse were all tuppenny parts and easy to find, but the 5L0165R is now more or less obsolete.  Nobody seems to stock the DIP-8 version in the UK, and carriage from the USA or China is crippling for 1 or 2 chips, so what to do?

Broken DVD Player

Here's a case of premature component failure in a Pacific DVD Player model 1002Mk2.

Pacific is a brand sold exclusively in the UK by the Asda supermarket chain.  The electronics seem quite well made, and this model has had very good reviews.  This particular player was bought new circa 2007.  It suffered a power fault about 3 years ago, which was traced to a 1000uF electrolytic capacitor on the main power rail.  That was replaced at a cost of about £0.20 - no other components appeared faulty at that time.

The player came back to me a couple of weeks ago with similar symptoms - on power-up, the standby LED would light, but it wouldn't do anything else.  Once on the workbench I powered it up to observe symptoms for myself - sometimes users don't always notice everything!  However, on pressing the standby button, the display flickered into life and the drive started spinning up.  After just two seconds, there was a loud bang, a small flash from inside the front right corner and everything died.  Life-expired then?

Windows Update KB2859537

Microsoft seem to be having a poor time with their monthly Windows updates in 2013.  August's monthly updates included several security patches including one for the kernel - KB2859537 - which seems to be causing a few problems.  Reported symptoms include application freezes and BSODs, but many systems are are unaffected.

Based on superficial evidence, problems may be affecting systems that have:

• Windows 7
• IE10 installed
• more than 3 cpu cores
• Avast antivirus installed
• third-party apps that directly alter the kernel.