AST Ascentia 910N Processor Board Failure

[PotatoFi]

Hey TinkerDifferent!

Good news - this thread is about a problem, but also has the solution! Backstory: I have an AST Ascentia 910N, which is a 486 DX2 with 8 MB of ram. I bought it for $25 from a friend when I was about 14 years old, some time in 2002. For 6-12 months, it was my only computer. It has no sound card, is cheaply built, has a passive matrix screen, is cheaply built, and uses proprietary RAM modules (and is probably stuck at 8 MB for forever). Overall, this is not a good machine, but it is sentimental.

Fast forward to this week, I decided to get it out, remove the CMOS battery, switch out the dead hard drive for an IDE to SD solution, and fix some other problems.

After running it for about 6 hours, during a Windows 3.1 installation reboot, it failed to post. It gave 3 short beeps, and 3 long beeps. I don't remember where, but I found an AST laptop table that indicated "processor board failure".

Edit: Found it! Here's where I found the beep codes.

I took the machine apart, and was surprised to find a 3.3v button-cell soldered to the bottom of the processor board (in addition to the ~7v Nicad CMOS battery). My friend Sam theorized that the battery might need to be fresh for it to boot. The old battery measured 0.03v.

It was a CR2023 or similar, but all I had were CR2025's on hand. I soldered one in, and it has been 100 percent reliable since then.

There is almost no documentation about this laptop online that I could find, so I just wanted to get this posted for when the batteries inevitably die on other AST Ascentia laptops, and they don't boot. I hope this helps someone else out!

 

[Drake]

This is the perfect family heirloom, the kids will fight over it ages from now.

 

[Jonas4321]

I also have one of these AST computers running WFW 3.11. I have hung onto it so that I had a PC with WFW 3.11, as one of my customers still uses a huge old Zeos with WFW 3.11 and Lotus Ami Pro 3.1 to do the majority of his report documents (he is a forensic psychologist, and even though he can afford to own the multiple iMac and MacBook computers he has, he is super comfortable with Ami Pro). I like to keep an operational computer for each of the main Windows versions.
I powered the AST up the other day and it gave me the 3 short, 3 long, a pause and then 7 beeps. After finding your post, I also took mine apart and found that the multi-cell (RTC?) battery had leaked and corrosion was everywhere. It even traveled down the wires to the connector that attached to the motherboard, making it impossible to unplug the connector. I eventually yanked hard enough that the wires broke off at the MB connector. I did not look for a 2032 button cell battery, I figured that if my actions killed the computer, that was what it was. To my surprise, the main battery is still taking and holding a charge, and since I cannot adjust the date past 12/31/1999 (it only has two places for the year in the BIOS), I have no problem setting the date/time when I want to use the computer! Thanks for creating this post, @PotatoFi, it led me to taking this action.