Swapped my multimeter routine after a bad reading cost me a motherboard

Back in April I was chasing a short on a Dell board and my old meter kept showing 0.4 ohms on a line I knew was clean. I replaced three capacitors and the board still wouldn't post. Turned out my test leads had a cracked solder joint inside the probe, giving me a false reading the whole time. Since then I switched to checking my leads against a known resistor before every job, takes about 20 seconds. Has anyone else had test leads go bad without any visible damage? I'm curious if this is more common than I thought.

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danielowens11d ago

My buddy Dan fried a $200 drone ESC last year because his leads read fine on the meter's continuity test but had a flaky connection under load. He only found out when he swapped leads with a spare set and the problem vanished.