How to physically tell if motherboard is bad or going bad

One of the best ways to see this is to look for bad capacitors on the board.
Here are images on bad capacitors;http://www.badcaps.net/pages.php?vid=5.
If you have any of these symptoms then it is likely that you could be getting a blue screen of death or even the computer doesn't even boot to the Post screen.
the best solution is of coarse to get a motherboard with the same specifications that the current one had.