During this time I was doing a lot of computer repair for family friends and other acquaintances that I volunteered with. Most of this work was unpaid for various reasons (either "Family Obligation(tm)" or me helping out some folks who didn't have enough money to pay for repair services). I often received a "Thank You" for the free service of the "it's broken, but have it -- maybe you can fix it" kind of variety[0]. Often, I'd explain that I couldn't do much with these things and would politely refuse, but on occasion, I'd run into an item that I knew I could sell broken on e-bay and recoup some cost, or I'd encounter someone who was embarrassed at not being able to afford to pay and would accept the item as a suitable gift to cover their pride.
Around 2006, I was given an exceptionally expensive plasma television from one of these individuals and really wanted to fix it up, so I took it apart and discovered that it was simply a case of some bulging capacitors. I have plenty of experience with a soldering iron but these weren't even difficult soldering jobs - they were large caps that were obviously part of the power supply component and having a box of these in the basement, I replaced them and ended up with a nice television that used until a couple of years ago.
While initially researching this model of television, I ran across complaints about failing capacitors which led me to some articles complaining about Dell motherboards having similar problems and a lot of noise about this being an industry epidemic, so I investigated the five or so PCs is my basement and seven LCD monitors. In the case of the displays, every one of them had bad caps on the PSU. In the case of the Dell PCs, it was motherboards. I fixed each and sold them for a few hundred a piece. I ended up buying a lot of broken stock on eBay based on descriptions of why they were broken and picked up a nice AVR, amp and sub-woofer that way saving at least 50% (I picked up the $300 amp for $10, my best purchase).
I had several of my own equipment die from this, including a SageTV media streaming device, almost all of the first generation of which had 6-7 bad caps. The lot of these sorts of problems started drying up around 2011/2012 for me, but I still encounter hardware that I suspect is a few bum caps away from perfectly functional. I even had my secondary sub, purchased in 1996, fail due to this.
[0] This happened more often than it didn't and was usually monitors. I recovered data from a bum hard drive for an old lady who had 4 different LCD monitors ranging from 1024x760-1280x1080 in her basement, all capable of only lighting the little LED in the front. It made no sense for her to have even one of these, let alone five. Sometimes it was the old PC that was a year old but failed and a replacement was gifted from the son-in-law for Christmas.