Hrm. I've got the manual for the motherboard. I'll suggest it to husband when he comes home. We have had weird things happen to the BIOS on crashes before, so it's worth a try.

Thanks.

It may be the motherboard battery going out. Cheap and easy to install.

Is there any way to check besides getting a replacement battery and testing it? Would the system clock be having problems if it's the battery, for example?

I'm not sure if there is a way to check except replacement, sorry. I was having some similar issues (random shut-downs, gibberish on the screen) and after ruling out overheating, memory, and malware I changed the battery and it worked. Not sure if it will work for you, just wanted to share my experience. Hopefully yours will be an easy and quick fix!

(I was a bit sad it wasn't the motherboard, since I already had my dream computer picked out)

Thanks for the advice! We'll definitely check it out.

The battery should only cost a couple of bucks, so no great loss if it didn't need replacing.

Resetting the BIOS (by pulling the battery) didn't fix the problem. From googling, it definitely sounds like 5 years isn't an unreasonable life expectancy for the mobo battery.

I still kind of suspect that it's a hardware failure, but going out to buy a battery will give me an excuse to get out of the house.

And just for fun, I pulled the memory and made sure the computer would boot with only two sticks in the various slots. I'm pretty darn sure it's not the memory.

God, I hate pulling and putting in memory.

And now the system won't even POST. We're getting the beeps that mean memory error. So either it was failing and has failed, or by messing with the memory, we fucked something up.

Sigh.

Possible 3G iPhone features found in beta software:

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