While you are working on your computer, it shuts down unexpectedly, and you detect a burning smell. when you remove the case cover, you notice a distended capacitor. what can you do to fix this problem? reseat the ram. replace the cmos battery. replace the power supply. replace the motherboard.

Replace the power supply

Explanation:

Usually, Capacitors burn up because of different factors.

- Exceeding operation voltage

- High Inverse voltage if is an electrolytic capacitor.

A tentative answer could be the battery, but usually the batteries damages are because wear out of them, that is, cycles of charging and discharging, a problem that could arise in the battery is related with the charge protection, this circuit cares that the battery only get the charge that it needs, in Li-po batteries is 3.7V, in some laptops is 24 V, if so the battery could explode or leaking acid.  

The mother-board is the "brain" and the Random Access Memory (RAM), they consume a lot of energy and usually heat up, but doesn’t produce increasing of voltage and its feed it by voltage regulators.

The only valid option is the power supply because the energy comes from a rectifier (made with diodes) and a voltage regulator that step-down the DC voltage output if by any chance the voltage increase or a diode burns up in the power supply the coupling capacitors or input capacitors in the computer will fail.