Garbled Screen, Freezing at POST

Arcygenical

Fully [H]
Joined
Jun 10, 2005
Messages
25,066
Hey Guys,

I'm having an issue with my car-PC. It uses an ibase MB899 motherboard, 1GB standard RAM, and the CPU is underclocked (stock volts) to 1ghz. All it does is play music.

Recently, it's been freezing up. It often refuses to POST from a cold start. Often times, it will POST to a garbled ASCII screen and freeze up. Sometimes the screen starts out fine, then gets garbled and freezes, even in the BIOS, and it typically freezes before Windows starts.

When it's warm, it seems to have better luck. In the hot summer, it seems to post just fine 8/10 times. In the cold of winter it seems to start around 1/10 times. When the car warms up, in the winter, it seems to have a better POST rate, though still not as good as during the hot summer.

It just started doing this. Any idea of what could be wrong? I'm thinking the motherboard battery may be dying, and the cold is reducing it's voltage below what the BIOS chip needs, however I don't have a battery on hand to test this theory out with.
 
I have no experience with car pc's but my first computer did this when the motherboard was on its way out,it finally got to the point that when I would type something it would come out all jumbled as well,then one day just powered down never to boot again
 
I don't know if this is what's happening in your case, but I've seen motherboards do that when there are leaking capacitors.
 
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